Prof. Dr. med. vet. Heiko Nathues graduated from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover, Germany in 2004. He spent some month in a specialised pig & poultry practice in Northern Germany. From late 2004 until 2011 he was employed at the Field Station for Epidemiology of the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover in Bakum, Germany, where he also obtained his Dr. med. vet. in 2007 and his PhD in 2011. The latter one was assigned with the ‘Konrad-Boegel-Award for veterinary epidemiology and veterinary public health’. During his time in Bakum he built up from the scratch a laboratory for molecular biology, for serology and for genetic engineering.

Awarded with a Marie-Curie Intra-European-Fellowship he joined the Veterinary Epidemiology, Economics and Public Health Group of the Royal Veterinary College in London, from 2011 to 2013. He was involved in the development of within-herd transmission models for pig diseases and contributed to various research projects dedicated to porcine health management. He also obtained a Postgraduate Certificate in Veterinary Education. In 2013 he finalized his habilitation and received the venia legendi for ‘Pig diseases and population medicine’ from the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover.

Prof. Nathues is the Director of the Clinic for Swine at the Vetsuisse Faculty of University of Bern in Switzerland since 2011. In recent years, he has acted as the President of the European College of Porcine Health Management (ECPHM), and later as the President of the European Board of Veterinary Specialty (EBVS), representing more than 5’000 European Veterinary Specialists from various disciplines and species. He also is the Editor in Chief of the journal ‘Porcine Health Management’, is Honorary Professor at the Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Science, Nanjing, and was a visiting Professor at the City University of Hongkong. His main research direction is the diagnosis, epidemiology, and disease prevention and control of porcine viral and mycoplasma diseases. He has published over 140 high-level papers and has been cited more than 1300 times.