Christian Gortazar

Cutting Edge Congress
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Professor Christian Gortázar defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Zaragoza in 1997 with an extraordinary award. He is a professor of animal health at the IREC Institute in Ciudad Real, a mixed center of the University of Castilla La Mancha and the CSIC.
Scientific activity: Combines ecology, veterinary science, and biotechnology tools. This includes viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases with an emphasis on the control of infections shared between wildlife, domestic animals, and humans, such as tuberculosis or vector-borne infections. The main scientific-technical achievements are (1) conceptual definition of the emergence mechanisms of pathogens from animals to humans; (2) identification of wild boar as a reservoir of the M. tuberculosis complex; (3) contributions to integrated sanitary control in mixed livestock/wildlife systems; and (4) advances in the epidemiological knowledge of infections shared with wildlife. Principal investigator in numerous national and international projects on epidemiology and control of shared diseases. https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=TGlMcM0AAAAJ&hl=es&oi=ao
Contribution to society: Responsible for livestock and aquaculture at the National Agency for Evaluation and Prospective in the period 2006 to 2008, and director of IREC between 2005 and 2008. He chaired the European section of Wildlife Disease Association (2012-2014). He is currently head of the IREC Health and Biotechnology (SaBio) research group and chief editor of the European Journal of Wildlife Research. From 2015 to 2024 he has participated in the Animal Health and Welfare Panel of the European Food Safety Authority EFSA (AHAW), where he has chaired the working group on African Swine Fever. Research contracts and collaborations with several national and international agencies, and contributions to innovation through 5 patents and a spin-off. The dissemination commitment includes >20 books and >100 contributions in specialized and general media, achieving, for example, >500k readings in The Conversation.
Training and teamwork: During his academic career he supervised >30 successful Spanish and international doctoral students, as well as 15 postdoctoral researchers. Many of them have meanwhile established themselves as independent researchers at leading academic institutions around the world.