Tatjana Avšič is Professor of Medical Microbiology at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana and Head of the Laboratory for Zoonosis Diagnostics at the Institute of Microbiology and Immunology in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has more than 40 years of experience in clinical diagnostics and research of zoonotic vector-borne diseases, mainly arboviruses and viral haemorrhagic fevers (VHF), which is reflected in more than 290 publications (SCI). She is head of the laboratory, which acts as a reference centre at national and international level. Her laboratory studies the genetic variability of emerging viruses in the context of the relationship between host, vector and human. Over the past 25 years, she has led numerous national and international research projects. Due to her scientific achievements, she was elected a full member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Section IV - Natural Sciences) in June 2015 and a full member of the Academia Europaea (Section C Life Sciences: Physiology and Neurosciences) in 2017.