Donewell Bangure is a senior epidemiologist with the African Union in the Laboratory Systems and Networks Division of Africa CDC. He has more than 18 years of work experience in public health laboratories and public health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was responsible for coordinating the deployment of COVID-19 Rapid Responders to support African Union Member States to respond to the pandemic. He was among the first set of field epidemiologist responders for the African Union Support for Ebola Outbreak in West Africa (ASEOWA) in 2014-2015 and one of the first epidemiologists to respond to the 9th and 10th Ebola Virus Disease outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018. Before joining Africa CDC, Donewell served for two years as Field Coordinator for the Zimbabwe Field Epidemiology Training Programme and as a Principal Medical Laboratory Scientist for 10 years with the Ministry of Health and Child Care, Zimbabwe. He was part of the team of experts that conducted the Joint External Evaluation for Liberia and Afghanistan, which assessed their capacity under the International Health Regulations (2005) to prevent, detect and rapidly respond to public health threats. He played a key role in the response to the mudslide disaster that killed more than 500 people in Sierra Leone in August 2017. Donewell is a graduate of the Africa CDC Fellowship programme and has expert skills in event-based and indicator-based surveillance and management of public health emergency response. In the past 18 years, he has published more than 60 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. Mr Bangure is a medical laboratory science graduate with graduate-level training in public health from the Zimbabwe Field Epidemiology Training Programme.