Prof Heiman Frank Louis Wertheim

Professor in Clinical Microbiology & Head of the Clinical Microbiology Department, Radboud University Medical Center 

Nationality – Netherlands   

Heiman Frank Louis Wertheim (MD, PhD, Nationality: Dutch) is a professor in clinical microbiology and heads the clinical microbiology department at Radboud University Medical Center, Netherlands. Heiman is president of the Netherlands Society of Medical Microbiology (www.nvmm.nl). 

Furthermore, he is treasurer of the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (www.isac.world) and of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA). He is developing a directed therapies global antibiotics guideline in collaboration with Souha Kanj (Lebanon). 

Until 2015, Heiman was director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Hanoi, Vietnam. He coordinated laboratory capacity strengthening and research in Southeast Asia and Africa. He worked on a broad range of infectious disease issues, varying from zoonoses to hospital acquired infections. One of his main interests is antibiotic resistance in both resource rich and resource constrained settings and does this through a multidisciplinary approach: health systems, policy development, behavior, surveillance, prevention, genomics, and clinical trials.

He supervised activities for the Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership (GARP) in Vietnam. He demonstrated that C-reactive protein point of care testing can bring down antibiotic use safely. Heiman is the PI of the ABACUS project that studies community antibiotic use in six Asian and African countries. ABACUS project studies also how the appearance of antibiotics influences use (https://abacus-project.org).