Marianne van der Sande is professor of Public Health Epidemiology and heads the Department of Public Health at ITM since July 2017.

Before joining ITM, she was for 10 years State Epidemiologist of the Netherlands, heading the Centre of Epidemiology and Surveillance of Infectious Diseases at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). Prior to that, she worked with MSF-Holland in Darfur-Sudan and Soroti-Uganda, with Memisa in Sichili-Zambia, and after obtaining an MPH at Johns Hopkins, at MRC The Gambia as medical epidemiologist.

Between 2014 and 2017 she was co-director of the WHO collaborating centre AMR. Since she joined ITM, she has been active in outbreak research, both acute outbreaks, and the slow AMR outbreak, with a particular interest in development and evaluation of interventions. She developed and coordinates the Outbreak Investigation and Research Module with the ITM MSc. Recently, she initiated vaccination studies with DRC partners.

She has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications and is a member of several international grant review panels.