Juergen Richt

Dr. Richt’s RVFV work led to the development of novel domestic and wild ruminant models for RVF and a safe, efficacious, and DIVA-compatible subunit vaccine. For ASFV, he is developing subunit and modified live virus vaccine candidates as well as Point-of-Need diagnostics (“PenCheck^TM”) to protect swine from this devastating disease. In the past few years, he worked on the establishment of preclinical animal models for SARS-CoV-2 to determine the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, and the susceptibility of livestock species to Mpox virus, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever virus (CCHFV), and Nairobi Sheep Disease Virus (NSDV). Recently, Dr. Richt established models to study the susceptibility of livestock to bovine H5N1 infections.

As founding Director of the DHS CEEZAD and the NIH CEZID Centers, he is supporting NIH, DHS and USDA in protecting public health and U.S. agricultural systems from devastating animal and zoonotic diseases. He is editor-in-chief for Virus Genes and serves on editorial boards for other scientific journals, among them Advances in Virus Research, Emerging Microbes and Infections, and Animal Diseases.

In 2011, Dr. Richt received the Pfizer Animal Health Award for Research Excellence. In 2018, Dr. Richt was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was recipient of the 2021 Excellence in Research Award from the American Academy of Veterinary Medical Colleges. That same year, Dr. Richt was named winner of the Dolph Simons Award for Biomedical Research by the University of Kansas. He is an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria, and has received an A rating from the National Research Foundation of South Africa. In 2022 he was named recipient of the inaugural Endowed Professorship from the Biosecurity Research Institute (BRI) at Kansas State University. In 2024, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and in 2026 to a Fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology.