Cesar Muoz-Fontela is the head of Research Group at Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine. Previously, he was the head of the Junior Research Group Emerging Viruses at Heinrich-Pette-Institute in Hamburg. Munoz-Fontela obtained his doctoral degree on Microbiology and Parasitology from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2005 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York.

He is a consultant for the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network as well as a member of the WHO Ebola Science Committee.