My research all involves investigating some elements of behaviour and infection in wild animals, generally linking from individual scales up to populations, species, and continents. These studies address lots of different main questions, but there are two main foci, each focussing at very different scales of biological organisation:

1) Untangling spatial and social behaviour and their influences on wildlife disease

Below on the left is a social network, and on the right is a spatial network for the same individuals.

They look undeniably similar. What implications does this have for disease ecology studies, which often rely on network methods to identify contact events and transmission mechanisms?

I am answering this question with a combination of different wild animal systems, spread broadly across the globe and the animal kingdom. I’m uniting the findings from all of these systems using meta-analyses of spatial and behaviour, immunity, and disease (e.g. This Paper), borrowing extensively from the expertise of Dan Becker at Indiana University.

Most recently, I aggregated a meta-dataset of >30 wild animal systems, examining fine-scale relationships between density and network structure within each system and then aggregating across them to understand general trends. The resulting meta-analysis is currently under review, and has spawned a wide range of interesting questions.

2) Understanding the intersection of ageing, behaviour, and infectious disease.

For several years, I have had an enduring interest in age-related changes in behaviour and their effects on infection. As you age, your behaviour changes, which influences exposure to each others infections. But most of our understanding of ageing and health centres around noncommunicable diseases, not infections.

I’ve carried out case studies on social ageing in deer and lions, an expansive review on behavioural ageing and its expected effects on infection, and a case study of age-behaviour-parasitism interactions in wild deer. With Josh Firth and a number of other researchers, we have produced a Phil Trans Special Issue on ageing and society (out soon!).

We have plans to investigate these processes across a wide range of different systems, and to use the results to model eco-evolutionary feedbacks between ageing, behaviour, immunity, and infection.

This is one of my most nascent burgeoning research areas, with plenty of questions to ask and plenty of enthusiasm to ask them. If you’re interested in these topics, or would like to test them in your system, please get in touch!

3) Unravelling the global host-virus network with the VERENA Institute.

In 2020, Dr Colin Carlson (Georgetown University) and I co-founded a consortium of researchers in virology, disease ecology, and network science: The Viral Emergence Research Initiative (VERENA). The team comprises scientists from diverse backgrounds and research groups, at over a dozen institutions. VERENA’s philosophy emphasises rigorous methodology, open research, and honest communication. The consortium is quickly developing our ability to predict spillovers and influence policy.

I led the team in publishing an integrative review of predictive models in host-virus ecology for Nature Microbiology, establishing a framework for network analyses in the field. Our inaugural research project, which I co-led, involved uniting eight different teams’ models of host-virus interactions to predict wildlife hosts of coronaviruses for use in sampling prioritisation. More recently, I co-led a study in Nature predicting how the mammalian viral sharing network will be reorganised by climate change.

Central to our work is collating and curating large, open databases of host-pathogen data including the aggregated CLOVER database, the dynamically updating VIRION database, and a dataset of documented human-to-wildlife transmission (“spillback”) events, among others. We are using these databases to answer numerous important questions, including identifying the role of urbanisation in driving parasite diversity, tracking the stability of observed viral diversity patterns through time, quantifying the threat of spillback for conservation and public health priorities, and more.

Additionally, we have been publishing a range of reviews to present and clarify concepts in the field, including a perspective on “synzootic” interactions between multiple wildlife pathogens, a forward-looking commentary on frontiers in zoonotic risk prediction, and a review of the state of knowledge on interactions between life history and zoonotic risk in wild animals.

Check out my publications for everything else!