Dr. Lidewij is a graduate of Bristol University (United Kingdom), where she completed a bachelors degree in immunology and virology at the medical faculty and her veterinary degree at the veterinary faculty. During her veterinary degree, she spent a year as an Erasmus exchange student at the Ecole nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (France). After graduating, she completed her ECVP Residency programme at Utrecht university (Netherlands) after which she worked for the German national public health institute, The Robert Koch institute in Berlin. She did her PhD on the topic of “Emerging viral respiratory zoonoses” at the department of virology at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam (NL). In 2015, she moved to Italy to work at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in Rome, where she was coordinating the laboratory unit of the animal health service. She is currently the CEO of EBVS and consults for FAO.