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Flavie Vial

Dr Flavie Vial has been Lead Scientist for International Development at APHA since 2021. She joined the agency as a statistician in 2017, before holding the role of Lead Scientist for Wildlife. Prior to joining the Civil Service, she held various posts in academia in the UK and Switzerland and worked as a biostatistics consultant in Sweden.

She has built her scientific career around the effective collection, integration, and interpretation of data to support decision making and policy within academia, government and international agencies. In the last fifteen years, she has used modelling to provide intelligence on emerging issues in the environmental (impact of livestock production on biodiversity and ecosystem resilience) and veterinary public health (development of early-warning surveillance systems) sectors. She currently sits as a Hearing Expert on the European Food Safety Authority’s working group on early warning surveillance in the animal health domain.

Now leading the international scientific portfolio for APHA, she works with a wide range of stakeholders overseas, in particular in low- and middle-income countries, to strategically develop and strengthen veterinary and animal health diagnostics infrastructures and capabilities. The shared goal of reducing the risk of zoonotic pandemics and protecting human populations from food system failures as a result of animal and plant disease outbreaks gives her a great sense of purpose.