Olivia Dimov is a PhD student at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Greifswald, Germany. As a veterinarian by training, she has always had a keen interest in zoonotic diseases and wildlife conservation medicine. During her studies, she worked at the Institute for Parasitology and Tropical Veterinary Medicine and within the project group Epidemiology of Highly Pathogenic Pathogens at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, before starting her PhD in February 2024. From 2022 on, she has been part of an annual two-month-long surveillance field mission to study biodiversity and disease emergence in bats and rodents in Tai National Park, Côte d'Ivoire. In autumn 2022, she served as a wildlife veterinarian at the Amazoonico Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in the amazon rainforest in Ecuador. For her PhD, she will analyse how restoration efforts shape biodiversity and influence disease emergence in the Afrotropics.