The Fondation Philippe Wiener-Maurice Anspach is delighted to announce the launch of a new initiative, the Wiener-Anspach Alumni Talks. Held in Brussels, these talks celebrate former Wiener-Anspach Fellows by creating opportunities to meet and exchange ideas on a variety of themes.

For this first edition, which will take place on Tuesday 27 February at 6.30 pm, Anne Teller and Marius Gilbert will discuss forty years of public policy in the environmental field, with a particular focus on the prioritisation of climate change and its consequences.

Anne Teller works as a senior expert in the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Health Unit of the Directorate-General Environment of the European Commission. She has a degree in Agricultural Engineering from the Université libre de Bruxelles and an MA in Forestry and its Relation to Land Management from the University Oxford, completed as part of a Wiener-Anspach Fellowship. Anne Teller has almost forty years’ experience in European environmental policy. Her main area of interest is improving the knowledge and evidence base for EU biodiversity policy. She coordinated the first EU wide ecosystem assessment, published in 2020, and took part in the development of a European knowledge governance aimed at structuring and formalising the dialogue between science and policy, in particular by setting up a Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. Anne Teller is the European Union’s lead negotiator on scientific and technical matters at the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

Marius Gilbert graduated in Agricultural Sciences at the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1995. Following a two-year Wiener-Anspach Doctoral Fellowship at the Department of Zoology of the University of Oxford, in 2001 he obtained a PhD from ULB on the spatial epidemiology of a forest insect pest. In 2006, he was awarded a permanent academic position with the Belgian FNRS and in 2016, he founded the Spatial Epidemiology Lab (SpELL) at ULB. During the COVID pandemic, he joined the Expert Group on the Exit Strategy (GEES) to advise the government on the lockdown exit strategy. In September 2020 he joined the team of the ULB Rector Annemie Schaus as Vice-Rector of Research and Valorization. His research focuses on the spatial epidemiology of animal diseases and invasive species. An overarching theme is the attempt to better understand how changes in agriculture and ecosystems have affected the conditions of emergence, spread and persistence of pathogens, including those with pandemic potential. His main areas of expertise include the epidemiology of avian influenza, emerging infectious diseases, global changes in livestock production systems, and livestock distribution models.

This event will be hosted in French by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation Alumni Network and will be followed by a reception.

Please register here by February 26 at the latest.

Contact: fwa.relations@ulb.be

Poster picture by Luca Bravo/Unsplash.