Dr Leo Visser

Head of Department of Infectious Diseases and Deputy Director of Internal Medicine Residency Program, Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), The Netherlands.  
Head of the LUMC travel clinic - a reference center for travel medicine and vaccination in The Netherlands. 

He is a professor of infectious diseases with specific interest in Travel Medicine.  He is a Member of the European Expert Committee on Travel Medicine and current President of the International Society of Travel Medicine. 

Professor Visser studied medicine at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. He specialized in Infectious Diseases at the Leiden University Medical Center, where he obtained his PhD (1997). The title of his doctoral thesis reads: ‘Virulence Proteins of Yersinia enterocolitica inhibit antimicrobial functions of professional phagocytes’. He was appointed as Professor in Infectious Diseases and Travel Medicine in 2014.  

For more than 20 years, Professor Visser has been involved in clinical care, research, teaching and training in internal medicine and infectious diseases, with the emphasis on vaccinology, vaccine-preventable and tropical diseases, travel medicine and global health. 

Professor Visser holds several positions at national and international committees and scientific organizations. Currently, Professor Visser is the Immediate past president of the International Society of Travel Medicine and member of the European Expert Committee for Travel Medicine. In the past he was, amongst others, member of the steering committee of TropNet, a European Network on the Surveillance of Imported Infectious Diseases (www.tropnet.eu) and chairman of the Dutch National Coordination Centre for Travellers' Health Advice (LCR). 

His current research activities involve vaccination responses in immunosuppressed hosts, long-term antibody responses to yellow fever vaccine in elderly, alternative vaccination routes, and immunogenicity and long-term memory of fractional dose and single visit rabies pre-exposure vaccination. He is board member of the Leiden Controlled human infections unit (https://campagne.lumc.nl/controlled-human-infections1).