Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum

Background

Muyembe grew up in Bandundu Province, the child of farmers, and was educated in schools run by the Catholic Jesuit order. He studied medicine at Lovanium University in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) from 1962, graduating in 1969, and earned a PhD in virology at the University of Leuven in Belgium. He returned to Zaire in 1973 and worked on cholera outbreaks, including a 1974 outbreak in Matadi. He first encountered Ebola in 1976 at a Belgian hospital in Yambuku, taking liver biopsies from three nuns who had died, with inconclusive results.

Career

He was the first scientist to come into contact with the virus and survive. He took blood from a sick nurse, which was sent for analysis to the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, then to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where Peter Piot used the sample to discover Ebola. That version of events regarding his role in the 1976 outbreak was later refuted in a 2016 scientific article he co-signed. He was appointed dean of the University of Kinshasa Medical School in 1978.

In 1981 he joined the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal, working with the CDC to study Ebola and Marburg viruses. In 1998 he was made director of the DRC National Institute for Biomedical Research. He has acted as an adviser to the WHO Emergency Committee on Ebola, leads 15 researchers studying sleeping sickness, bas-Congo virus, and Ebola, and has advised political leadership in West Africa. He recognized sociocultural challenges of Ebola, encouraging hospitals to improve infection control and community engagement.

He worked with David L. Heymann on the 1995 Ebola outbreak, called by the director of Kikwit General Hospital for help with deadly diarrhea; he recognized it as Ebola and sent samples to the CDC. He has chaired international committees controlling Ebola outbreaks in Gabon and the DRC. He leads research into Ebola virus reservoirs in the DRC. In 2009, he demonstrated that Ebola outbreaks in the DRC were due to fruit bat exposure.

He developed an anti-Ebola serum therapy using antibodies from convalescent patients, first tried during the 1976 outbreak and recommended for future outbreaks by the International Commission set up by the DRC government. In 2014, he was appointed by WHO Director General Margaret Chan to the WHO Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response.

Did You Know?

• Muyembe was described by The Lancet as Africa's Ebola hunter.
• He was named one of Nature's 10 in 2018 and 2019.
• He was included in Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
• He was awarded the 2023 WHO Director General's Global Leaders Award.
• On 27 June 2026, he was promoted to Commander of the National Order of the Leopard.