Stef Bronzwaer (1967) was born in Heerlen, the Netherlands. He went to the University of Amsterdam where he graduated as medical doctor in 1995. In 2001 he completed his Master of Public Health degree at the Netherlands School of Public Health in Utrecht, and in 2003 he completed his PhD in Medical Sciences at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands.

As a medical doctor he worked shortly at the Social Medical Centre ‘Bukas Palad’ in a slum-area near Manila, the Philippines, where he also studied risk factors for a complicated disease course in children with measles.

In 1997 he moved to the Infectious disease unit of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome, Italy, where he worked as project manager of an EU-project making an inventory of resources and means for controlling communicable diseases.

From 1998 to 2002 he worked in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Bilthoven, the Netherlands, where he helped establish the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (EARSS), for which he served as project leader.

From 2002 to 2005 he worked at the Directorate Public Health (DG Health and Consumer protection) at the European Commission in Luxembourg where he held responsibility for the proper functioning and coherence of a number of European surveillance networks on communicable diseases and followed the implementation of the Community strategy against antimicrobial resistance.

Since February 2006 he works at the European Food Safety Authority, now as a Head of Advisory Forum & Scientific Cooperation Unit