Kim Grützmacher

Dr. Kim Gruetzmacher is a Program Manager for the Health Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). She graduated from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich with a veterinary degree in 2009. Before vet school she was a science intern on Dr. Roger Payne’s research vessel Odyssey, where she assisted with research, investigating the levels of persistent organic pollutants in sperm whales. Her passion for wildlife led her to gain work experience in conservation medicine in many countries around the world, including Australia, Cambodia, Canada, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Tanzania. She worked at Hanover Zoo before enrolling in a PhD program in Biomedical Sciences at the Free University Berlin, conducting her research at the Robert Koch Institute (in collaboration with the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) with fieldwork in the Central African Republic, where she set up a field laboratory for wildlife health monitoring, to perform on-site and real-time investigations of wildlife disease outbreaks. In her PhD, she focused on anthropogenic respiratory disease in habituated wild great apes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Alongside her PhD training Kim obtained a certificate from the University of Sasketchewan’s ITraP (Integrated Training Program in Infectious Disease, Food Safety and Public Policy), in 2014. In 2016 she was awarded the Rudolf Ippen Young Scientist Award. At WCS Kim provides technical guidance on wildlife health and health management issues as they arise for WCS site and species-focused conservation projects, within a One World, One Health framework. She is particularly interested in disease and pathogen dynamics at the human/wildlife/livestock interface, along gradients of land use change and ecosystem disturbance, traditional ecological knowledge, behavioral and social aspects of disease transmission/prevention, and holistic approaches to global health challenges.