Research expertise

Emmanuel Bottieau graduated as Medical Doctor from the “Université Catholique de Louvain” in 1988. He followed the post-graduate course of Tropical Medicine in 1988-1989 and gained clinical experience in tropical medicine and international health working with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF-Belgium) from 1989 to 1993. He obtained the master diploma in General Medicine in 1994 (“Université Catholique de Louvain”) and specialized in Internal Medicine from 1994 to 1999 (including one year of specialization in Infectious Diseases) at the “Université Libre de Bruxelles”. He joined the Department of Clinical Sciences of the Institute in 1999. Since then, he is involved in the clinical activities (consultations, ward supervision,…) at the outpatient department of the Institute and in the inpatient unit of Tropical and HIV Medicine in the “Universitair Ziekenhuis van Antwerpen”. In 2007 he obtained his PhD degree at the University of Antwerp with a thesis on fever after a stay in the tropics.He has been appointed as Associate Professor in November 2012 and leads the Unit of Tropical Diseases since then. His research activities have included operational research on HIV and malaria in Mozambique (within the projects “Rede Integrada I and II”, with capacity strengthening in HIV care as main objective), clinical and diagnostic studies in the tropics and in travel clinics, and industry-sponsored clinical trials.  His main current research topics are (1) the integrated management (diagnosis-treatment) of febrile illness in the tropics and in travellers (2) the clinical management of Neglected Tropical Diseases, with a focus on cysticercosis, schistosomiasis, strongyloidiasis and filarial infection and (3) the clinical decision-making in complex syndromes (neurological disorders, febrile illness,...) in low-resource settings.Research activities in travel medicine are frequently conducted in collaboration with internetional networks of travel clinics such as GeoSentinel, TropNet,,..

Teaching expertise

Course director (since 2013) and teacher in the post-graduate course Clinical/biomedical Sciences of Tropical Diseases

Teacher in different other ITM courses:

• Master in international health (on tropical medicine, clinical decision-making, blood transfusion, travel medicine, humanitarian emergencies)

• Post-graduate course for nurses  (on tropical medicine, clinical decision-making, humanitarian emergencies)

  Master in disease control (on vector-borne diseases, tuberculosis,...)

• Short Course on Antiretroviral Treatment (SCART)

• Short Course on Research and Evidence-based Medicine (since 2009)

Teacher outside ITM

• Visiting Professor of the Gorgas Course of Clinical Tropical Medicine, University Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru (since 2012)

• Lecturer in the Summer Course Global Health Diagnostics, Mac Gill University, Montreal, Canada (2015)

• Lecturer in the Travel Course of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Basel, Switzerland (2015)

• Lecturer in the «Cours Interuniversitaire d’Infectiologie et Microbiologie Clinique» ULB-UCL-ULG (since 2013)  

Services expertise

Besides the reference consultations for tropical and travel-related pathology, Emmanuel Bottieau has been lecturing for years tropical medicine, travel medicine and clinical decision-making for different organizations (Médecins sans Frontières, Artsen Zonder Vakantie, Luxemburg Air Rescue, local groups of general practitioners and internists). He also provides expert advice to the Belgian authorities and the European Medicine Agency for the evaluation of new drugs and vaccines in the field of tropical medicine (malaria, human African trypanosomiasis, dengue, Ebola,…). He is member of different professional bodies in Belgium and abroad (Belgian Society of Infectiology and Clinical Microbiology; European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases; International Society of Travel Medicine) and acts as Associated Editor for the Journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection. He is also one of the contact persons in Belgium for different international working groups on Chagas disease, cysticercosis, echinococcosis,…).