Alison Peel

I am an ARC DECRA Fellow in the Griffith Wildlife Disease Ecology group at the Environmental Futures Research Institute at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

I have a veterinary background, and my primary interests lie in the dynamics and drivers of infectious disease in wildlife, and particularly regarding the role of landscape change and anthropogenic influence in these dynamics. I investigated the disease risk of importing amphibians into the UK for my Masters in Wild Animal Health (Royal Veterinary College and Institute of Zoology, London, 2007) and the population genetics and epidemiology of zoonotic viruses in African fruit bats for my PhD (University of Cambridge, 2012).

My current research recognises that the complexity of natural host-virus systems can compromise insights gained from single-host-single pathogen studies and that considering multi-host-multi-pathogen communities is a more holistic approach. I'm interested in how Hendra virus, the most widely studied bat virus in Australia, exists within a diverse community of viruses in Australian flying-foxes, and how the various species within flying fox communities contribute unequally to transmission and spillover. Hendra virus in Australian flying-foxes, and its spillover to horses and humans, is the best understood emerging bat pathogen spillover system, and by examining it in this broader context, I hope to provide insight into both Hendra virus dynamics and bat virus spillover in general.