Aldo Dekker is a veterinarian by training, and started to work at the Central Veterinary Institute 2 years after graduation. He has been working mainly on pathogenesis, diagnosis, vaccine control, and epidemiology of FMD and SVD. During the last 10 years especially, he has focused on the combination of vaccine control and epidemiology by quantifying FMDV transmission and cross-protection, which included mathematical modeling of animal experiments, advice on disease transmission models, and running the laboratory work for the animal experiments.