Speaker bio page for Susanna Williamson

Susanna Williamson leads Government-funded pig disease scanning surveillance in England and Wales and is the veterinary lead for the Pig Expert Group at the Animal and Plant Health Agency. She works with colleagues in APHA, practitioners and the pig industry to develop and deliver surveillance for pig endemic diseases and new and emerging threats. This includes pig disease investigations and threat characterisation, and assisting with training and development of expertise. Susanna was President of the Pig Veterinary Society (PVS) in 2016-17 and is a member of the PVS Executive Committee, the Pig Health and Welfare Council and its surveillance and antimicrobial use subgroups. From 2000 to 2014, Susanna was a Veterinary Investigation Officer at the Veterinary Investigation Centre at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk undertaking disease and surveillance investigations and diagnostic post-mortem examinations in livestock and wildlife. She qualified as a veterinary surgeon from the Royal Veterinary College, London and spent two years in mixed veterinary practice based in Oxford.  After working with the Government Veterinary Services and as a locum in Zimbabwe she went to the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh and gained a PhD for work on the protozoal disease, tropical theileriosis, in cattle. The PhD was funded by the Overseas Development Administration (ODA, now Department for International Development) and was followed by work on ODA smallholder dairy farm projects in Kenya and Morocco on the diagnosis, epidemiology and control of tick-borne diseases of cattle.  She returned to Scotland in 1999 and, after working as a locum Veterinary Investigation Officer at SAC Edinburgh, joined the VLA (now APHA) in Bury St Edmunds in 2000.