Professor Joost Hopman

Professor Joost Hopman, MD, PhD, DTM&H, born 11/08/1976 is working as medical director and consultant microbiologist in the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands and is appointed as visiting professor at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.

Since 2020 he chairs the Prevention Committee, that coordinates all prevention projects and programs in the Radboudumc. He acts as a consultant for Doctors without Borders (Médecins sans frontières) Amsterdam. He is an advisory board member of the Infection Control African Network (ICAN) and acted as a board member of the Dutch IPC section of the Netherlands Society of Medical Microbiology (NVMM).

During the COVID-19 pandemic he serves as a member of the WHO Environment and Engineering Control Expert Advisor Panel (ECAP) for COVID-19, the WHO ad-hoc COVID-19 IPC expert group and the Federation Medical Specialists (FMS) Guideline development expert group IPC, the Netherlands. Furthermore he acted in 2020 as chair of the COVID-19 Outbreak Management Team, University Medical Center Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Joost was invited to work as an IPC consultant for World Health Organization (WHO) in 2014 and 2015 in the Ebola outbreak response in Geneva and Sierra Leone and this has provided him with valuable experience in international outbreaks. From 2015-2018 he was appointed as a senior extraordinary lecturer in community health at the Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is co-author of more than 50 publications in peer-review journals (among others in NEJM, JAMA network, Lancet infectious disease, EClinicalmedicine), a textbook chapter on patient areas and environmental cleaning and he contributed to WHO, CDC and WIP guidelines.

His research interests focuses on prevention. It includes the epidemiology and prevention of healthcare-associated infections, new innovative methods of improving implementation of prevention interventions as part of patient safety programs in both high- and low- resource settings and the impact of the hospital built environment on prevention and patient safety. In 2017-2019 he was a member of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) conference organizing committee. In 2019 Joost served as a consultant for Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) focusing on IPC in the Dutch Caribbean. For his work he was elected as one of the International SHEA ambassadors in 2016 and was awarded with the Radboud University medal for young potentials. In 2023 Joost was awarded as the Kelsey lecturer 2023.

Joost is strongly committed to improve the health system in both high- and low/middle-income countries.