Prof Frans Jongejan, who is ranked as the top veterinary scientist in South Africa, is researching exactly what makes a tick decide to bite a person or an animal.

Prof Frans Jongejan of the University of Pretoria (UP) is the top-cited veterinary scientist in South Africa, according to Research.com’s ranking of best scientists. And if you were wondering why you don’t see him around, it’s because he does not live in South Africa.

Prof Jongejan is based in the Netherlands and is an extraordinary professor at UP. The honorific refers to his non-permanent status. It might not be a full-time position, but it is longstanding: he was appointed to the Faculty of Veterinary Science in 2000, and in January this year, when he visited South Africa for his birthday, it was extended for another three years.

That extension seems to bear more significance for him than his Research.com ranking, which positions him as the 74^th best veterinary scientist in the world. It’s all because of who signed the contract on behalf of UP’s Vectors and Vector-borne Diseases Research Programme in the Department of Veterinary Tropical Diseases – its head of department, Prof Tshepo Matjila, who is Prof Jongejan’s former master’s student who studied under him at Utrecht University in the Netherlands for a couple of months.

Prof Jongejan’s collaboration with UP has now come full circle. Prof Matjila’s predecessor, Prof Koos Coetzer, had set the ball rolling when he signed up Prof Jongejan 22 years ago.

“It has been a wonderful journey together,” said Prof Jongejan of his relationship with UP.

Prof Jongejan was director of the Utrecht Centre for Tick-borne Diseases (UCTD), a Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Reference Centre for Ticks and Tick-borne Diseases at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Utrecht University until 2020.

He has since started his own company, TBD International BV, a laboratory in the Netherlands, hosted by Wageningen University, that focuses on ticks and tick-borne diseases. TBD International BV provides services and products to the pharmaceutical industry, and international and contract research organisations. This includes a livestock parasite mapping project in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Uganda through an agreement with the veterinary contract research organisation Clinvet International, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is also a consultant on ticks and tick-borne diseases for the United Nations FAO.

Prof Jongejan’s most cited work, ‘The global importance of ticks’, co-written with Gerrit Uilenberg and published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, has 2046 citations. It lists the most important tick species and the effects they cause, discusses the impact of ticks and their diseases on animal production and public health, and how to control them.

“We made an effort not to summarise or ruminate on information that everybody is already aware of, but looked at what has been proven in terms of which tick is transmitting which parasite,” Prof Jongejan explained. “That has been very useful for colleagues.”

He has published 231 research papers in international scientific journals and is a member of the World Forum on Companion Animal Vector-borne Diseases, coordinated by the global company, Elanco Animal Health.

Prof Jongejan gets a kick out of co-supervising postgraduate UP students, and is enthusiastic about the research of his current master’s student, Johann Kotzé, who he is co-supervising with Prof Geoffrey Fosgate. Kotzé is developing a mathematical model for an evasive cattle tick to predict what happens when the tick is introduced into an area.

“It’s the first time this has been done and is of huge importance in terms of that tick reducing livestock productivity,” Prof Jongejan said.

His own recent research includes precisely determining what makes a tick decide to bite a human or a dog.

“We are putting ticks into artificial chambers with blood to simulate the conditions in order to study when, what and why a particular tick is attached to an artificial membrane,” he explained. “You can make the membrane more attractive with a dog or cow smell. “

Other research he has done in the past includes a smartphone app that helped people identify the types of ticks biting domestic pets in the Netherlands.