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Professor of Biology, Entomology and Biotechnology, Penn State

We work on the ecology and evolution of infectious disease.

We are interested in virulence and infectiousness, adaptation to new hosts, vaccine failure, and drug and insecticide resistance.

We want to know what can be done to slow, stop or even reverse the evolution that harms human health and well being. Conventional biomedical science tries to understand molecules, genes and biochemical pathways. We want to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes involved.

Our work involves evolutionary biology, ecology, parasitology, microbiology, epidemiology, genetics, and immunology. We do a lot of experimentation, a lot of quantitative analyses, and a fair bit of math modeling.

We currently work with malaria, Marek's disease, myxomatosis, VRE and cancer.

Experience

  • –present
    Professor of Biology and Entomology, Pennsylvania State University

Education

  • 1989 
    University of Oxford, D.Phil