Robert Colebunders

Background

About Robert Colebunders

Robert Colebunders, MD, PhD is an emeritus professor of tropical diseases at the Institute of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Antwerp. He worked as a general practitioner from 1974-75 in Bougaa, Algeria. After his specialisation in internal medicine he worked from 1985-88 in the Democratic of Congo as coordinator of the clinical studies on HIV/AIDS of "Projet SIDA" in Kinshasa. He is one of the first physicians who studied and described the clinical manifestations of HIV infection in Africa. He was a member of the international team that investigated and controlled 2 haemorrhagic fever outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ebola in Kikwit 1996 and Marburg in Durba, In 2004-5 he worked at the Infectious diseases Institute in Kampala, Uganda to assist with the roll out of antiretroviral therapy. He was involved in research projects concerning the management of HIV and HIV co-infections in Uganda, the Central African Region, Ethiopia and South Africa. He was coordinating a large Institutional University Collaboration between Flemish Universities and the University of Limpopo, South Africa. In 2014 he obtained an advanced ERC grant to determine the cause of nodding syndrome and epilepsy in onchocerciasis endemic regions. He discovered that nodding syndrome is only one of the phenotypic presentations of onchocerciasis-associated epilepsy and that this form of epilepsy can be prevented by the elimination of onchocerciasis. He is author/co-author of more than 750 papers published in peer-reviewed journals.