Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum

Early life and education Muyembe grew up in Bandundu Province, the child of farmers. He was educated in schools run by the Catholic Jesuit order. He studied medicine, starting in 1962, at Lovanium University in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) and graduated in 1969, there he became interested in microbiology. He earned a PhD in virology at the University of Leuven in Belgium, working on viral infections with mouse models. He returned to Zaire (another former name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1973 and worked in the cholera outbreak control. In 1974 there was a cholera outbreak in Matadi, which was the first crisis that Muyembe worked on. Muyembe took liver biopsies from three nuns who had died, but the results were inconclusive. He was the first scientist to come into contact with the virus and survive. Muyembe has been described as one of the discoverers of Ebola due to his work in the 1976 outbreak.

He has acted as an adviser to the World Health Organization Emergency Committee on Ebola. Here he leads 15 researchers studying sleeping sickness, bas-Congo virus and the Ebola.

He recognised the sociocultural challenges of Ebola, encouraging hospitals to improve their infection control and community engagement. He has developed an anti-Ebola serum therapy which, using antibodies from convalescent patients, was first tried by another medical team during the 1976 outbreak in Yambuku and subsequently recommended for future outbreaks by the International Commission set up by the Government of DRC (formerly Zaïre). In 2014, he was appointed by Director General Margaret Chan to the WHO Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response, co-chaired by Sam Zaramba and David L. Heymann.

There was a further Ebola outbreak in 2018, which took time to control due to delays in reporting. The Wellcome Trust and Department for International Development donated £1 million each. That position on the use of experimental drugs during outbreaks stirred some heated debate in the DRC, with Dr Oly Ilunga eventually resigning from his position as the Minister of Health, citing undue pressure and interference from unnamed multinational pharmaceutical firms.

Muyembe has established multiple research facilities, including a polio and influenza lab. In 2017 he partnered with the Japan International Cooperation Agency to build a research complex with several biosafety labs.

On April 3, 2020, during a press conference in Kinshasa, Muyembe advocated for the trial in DRC of experimental vaccines against the COVID-19 virus in the midst of a major pandemic, generating a serious backlash from the Congolese population; he eventually backtracked, saying that there had been a misunderstanding.

Awards and honours In 2015, he was awarded the Christophe Mérieux Prize to study further research in the Congo Basin. That year he was awarded the Royal Society Africa Prize for his seminal work on viral haemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, generating the foundation of our understanding of the epidemiology, clinical manifestations and control of outbreaks of these viral infections. He was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2015 International Symposium on Filoviruses. He was named as one of Nature's 10 in 2018 and 2019. In 2019 he won the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize from the Government of Japan. Muyembe was included in Times 100 Most Influential People of 2020. In 2022, Harvard University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree. He was awarded 2023 WHO Director General's Global Leaders Awards as a distinguished scientist and public health leader who was closely involved in the discovery of Ebola before advancing to leadership positions in global health. The award honours his lifetime achievements in public health. On 27 June 2026, he was promoted to the rank of Commander of the National Order of the Leopard, one of the DR Congo's highest national honours.