We study vector and host communities to better understand their interactions and the pathogens that circulate among them at key points of interface in the landscape. We are keenly interested in the ways in which disturbance across multiple scales of biological organisation can impact on population, community, ecosystem, landscape, and regional processes to facilitate pathogen transmission. This complex, multi-scale organisation of ecological interaction represents the core of our conceptualisation of landscape epidemiology. At the Lab we investigate zoonotic pathogens by combining methods from spatial and infectious disease epidemiology with methods from population ecology, community ecology, landscape ecology, and macroecology to employ transdisciplinary One Health approaches for zoonosis inference, prediction, surveillance, and prevention. Understanding the natural nidus of infection is our primary focus, and the One Health paradigm our driving and unifying philosophy.
We work with disease surveillance data generated through ongoing passive and active collection and reporting mechanisms, as well as targeted, systematic local field surveys, to initiate and support ecological and epidemiological investigation of pathogens, vectors and their maintenance communities. We apply state-of-the-art field methods, geocomputation, machine learning analytics, and network science to the interrogation of spillover processes at the wildlife-livestock-human interface to infer ecological and epidemiological relationships and predict risk. We seek to pursue, develop and promote scientific research that bridges the fields of epidemiology and ecology in both philosophy and method. We feel such collaboration is foundational to the One Health paradigm.