Head of Planetary Health | Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Dr. Kim Gruetzmacher is currently a scientist and head of planetary health at the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) / Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science as well as Senior Advisor One Health / Biodiversity and Health in the GIZ global program Support to the International Alliance against Health Risks in Wildlife Trade. Previously, she worked as a Program Manager for the Health Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). At WCS Kim provided technical guidance on wildlife health and health management issues as they arose for WCS site and species-focused conservation projects,
within a One Health framework.
Kim graduated from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich with a veterinary degree in 2009. Before vet school she was a science intern on Dr. Roger Payne’s research vessel Odyssey, where she assisted with research, investigating the levels of persistent organic pollutants in sperm whales. Her passion for wildlife led her to gain work experience in conservation medicine in many countries around the world, including Australia, Cambodia, Canada, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Tanzania. She worked as a veterinarian at Hanover Zoo before enrolling in a PhD program in Biomedical Sciences at the Free University Berlin, conducting her research at the Robert Koch Institute’s Project Group P3 (in collaboration with the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) with fieldwork in the Central African Republic, where she set up a field laboratory for wildlife health monitoring, to perform on-site and real-time investigations of human and wildlife disease outbreaks. In her PhD, she focused on anthropogenic respiratory disease in habituated wild great apes in Sub Saharan Africa. Alongside her PhD training Kim obtained a certificate from the University of Saskatchewan’s ITraP (Integrated Training Program in Infectious Disease, Food Safety and Public Policy – One Health), in 2014. In 2016 she was awarded the Rudolf Ippen Young Scientist Award. She is the vice-chair of the scientific advisory board on One Health to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Kim is particularly interested in anthropogenic drivers of disease emergence and pathogen dynamics at the human/wildlife/livestock interface, along gradients of land use change and ecosystem disturbance, traditional ecological knowledge, behavioral and social aspects of disease transmission/prevention, and holistic approaches to global health challenges, such as One Health
and Planetary Health.
