Magnus Gelang is a biologist focusing on bats and birds. He is also a senior curator at Gothenburg Natural History Museum, Sweden. His is one of the 61 volunteers experts that formed the CETAF/DISSCO COVID-19 Task Force joining every Friday since the very beginning of April to share expertise and knowledge and undertake tangible actions towards the understanding, monitoring and prevention of viral outbreaks. Meet him, together with all the participants of the Task Force during our public event on Friday 17 July at 2 pm CEST ! Where? https://bit.ly/3ebGRoL (zoom) The event will be introduced by Dr Pam Soltis (curator of Molecular Systematics & Evolutionary Genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. and Director for Research Activities for iDigBio) that will give us the context and challenges of such initiative. This will be followed by presentations by the 4 Activity leaders who will share their work. Following the presentations, you will have the opportunity to engage with the COVID-19 Task Force volunteers and all the rest of participants. The community of scientists linked to natural sciences collections represent a strong community that has created over decades a powerful knowledge-base that can be instrumental to understand the origin and causes of zoonotic infectious diseases as well as the processes and mechanisms that should be put in place to complement the efforts made in other disciplines, as biomedical sciences. Researchers from collections-linked organizations from all over the world have joined forces around the COVID-19 TaF and are willing to contribute to give a scientific-led response to the pandemic with a two-folded objective: 1) To identify the areas and topics to which we can contribute as to find the treatments, drugs and vaccines necessary faster and more effectively; 2) to anticipate and prevent the occurrence and propagation of a health crisis as the one our world is currently facing caused by SAS-CoV-2.a Do you have questions? info@cetaf.org More info: www.cetaf.org