I am a population biologist, Professor of Mathematical Biology in the Department of Biology and Fellow at St Peters College. Before Oxford, I held a Royal Society Research Fellowship and completed postdoctoral, PhD and undergraduate training at Imperial College.

In this talk I will introduce ideas from population biology and use them to help us understand emerging and novel pathogen spread. I will review our recent work on defining pandemics, detecting novel pathogens and approaches to controlling these novel threats. I will highlight our covid fieldwork and the advantages/limitations of detection methods for rare pathogens.