Dr Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum
Director of the National Biomedical Research Institute (INRB), Democratic Republic of the Congo
Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum is a Congolese microbiologist. He is the General Director of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale (INRB). He was part of the Yambuku Catholic Mission Hospital that investigated the first Ebola outbreak, and was part of the effort that discovered Ebola as a new disease. In 2016, he led the research that designed, along with other researchers at the INRB and the National Institute of Health Vaccine Reseach Center in the US, one of the most promising treatment for Ebola, mAb114. The treatment was successfully experimented during recent outbreaks in the DRC. In 2015 he was awarded the Christophe Mérieux Prize to study further research in the Congo Basin. That same year, he was awarded the Royal Society Africa Prize “for his seminal work on viral haemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, generating the foundation of our understanding of the epidemiology, clinical manifestations and control of outbreaks of these viral infections”. In 2019 he won the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize from the Government of Japan and one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.