Francis Schaffner

Francis Schaffner, French, PhD, is a medical and veterinary entomologist, focusing first on mosquitoes, but also on biting midges, sand flies, and biting flies. He devoted the first part of his career to sustainable mosquito control and to mosquito taxonomy in France, first in Alsace, later on the Mediterranean coast. From 2007 to 2013, he was working at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, Institute of Parasitology, developing research and surveillance programmes of insect vectors. He’s still associate researcher at that Swiss institute. He also worked from 2009 to 2016 for Avia-GIS, a Belgian company that is developing tools for surveying vectors. Since 2016, Francis is working as freelance consultant, mainly supporting international bodies (ECDC, EFSA, WHO) and national authorities do develop networking (e.g. VBORNET/VectorNet) and risk assessment plans for vector-borne disease. Francis has now more than 30 years of experience in surveillance, control, taxonomy, ecology of insect vectors and epidemiology of human and animal vector-borne diseases. He is a leader in European mosquito taxonomy and throughout his career he devoted much time to training and capacity building. Francis published 97 articles in peer-reviewed journals and 45 other papers, booklets, book chapters or CD-ROM, 91 reports, and presented 200 contributions to international (165) or national (35) meetings.