Oliver George Pybus is a British biologist. He is professor of evolution and infectious disease at the University of Oxford [1] and professor of infectious diseases at the Royal Veterinary College. [2] He is also editor-in-chief of Virus Evolution [3] and co-Director of the Oxford Martin School Program for Pandemic Genomics. [4] He is known for his work on the evolution and epidemiology of viruses and for helping to establish the field of phylodynamics. In recognition of his work, he has received several awards including the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2009, [5] the Daiwa Adrian Prize in 2010, an ERC Consolidator Award in 2014, [6] and the Mary Lyon Medal of the Genetics Society in 2019, and in 2022 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. [7]
Pybus obtained his B.Sc. in genetics from the University of Nottingham, where he studied with Bryan Clarke, followed by a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2000 under the supervision of Paul Harvey.
Edmund Brisco "Henry" Ford was a British ecological geneticist. He was a leader among those British biologists who investigated the role of natural selection in nature. As a schoolboy Ford became interested in lepidoptera, the group of insects which includes butterflies and moths. He went on to study the genetics of natural populations, and invented the field of ecological genetics. Ford was awarded the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 1954. In the wider world his best known work is Butterflies (1945).
Bryan Campbell Clarke was a British Professor of genetics, latterly emeritus at the University of Nottingham. Clarke is particularly noted for his work on apostatic selection and other forms of frequency-dependent selection, and work on polymorphism in snails, much of it done during the 1960s. Later, he studied molecular evolution. He made the case for natural selection as an important factor in the maintenance of molecular variation, and in driving evolutionary changes in molecules through time. In doing so, he questioned the over-riding importance of random genetic drift advocated by King, Jukes, and Kimura. With Professor James J Murray Jnr, he carried out an extensive series of studies on speciation in land snails of the genus Partula inhabiting the volcanic islands of the Eastern Pacific. These studies helped illuminate the genetic changes that take place during the origin of species.
Sir Peter James Donnelly is an Australian-British mathematician and Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, and the CEO of Genomics PLC. He is a specialist in applied probability and has made contributions to coalescent theory. His research group at Oxford has an international reputation for the development of statistical methodology to analyze genetic data.
Nicholas Hamilton Barton is a British evolutionary biologist.
Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson is a leading international authority on the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases. He is the author, with Robert May, of the most highly cited book in this field, entitled Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control. His early work was on the population ecology of infectious agents before focusing on the epidemiology and control of human infections. His published research includes studies of the major viral, bacterial and parasitic infections of humans, wildlife and livestock. This has included major studies on HIV, SARS, foot and mouth disease, bovine tuberculosis, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), influenza A, antibiotic resistant bacteria, the neglected tropical diseases and most recently COVID-19. Anderson is the author of over 650 peer-reviewed scientific articles with an h-index of 125.
Sunetra Gupta is an Indian-born British infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. She has performed research on the transmission dynamics of various infectious diseases, including malaria, influenza and COVID-19, and has received the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award of the Royal Society. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of Collateral Global, an organisation which examines the global impact of COVID-19 restrictions.
This Daiwa Adrian Prize is an award given by The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, a UK charity, to scientists who have made significant achievements in science through Anglo-Japanese collaborative research. Prizes are awarded every third year and applications are handled by the foundation with an assessment conducted by a panel of Fellows of The Royal Society.
Paul H. Harvey is a British evolutionary biologist. He is Professor of Zoology and was head of the zoology department at the University of Oxford from 1998 to 2011 and Secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 2000 to 2011, holding these posts in conjunction with a professorial fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford.
Niyaz Ahmed is an Indian molecular epidemiologist, professor of microbial sciences, genomicist, and a veterinarian by training, based in Hyderabad.
Dame Angela Ruth McLean is professor of mathematical biology in the Department of Biology, University of Oxford, and Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government.
Laurence Daniel Hurst is a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Bath and the director of the Milner Centre for Evolution.
Bryan Thomas Grenfell is a British population biologist and the Kathryn Briger and Sarah Fenton Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Viral phylodynamics is the study of how epidemiological, immunological, and evolutionary processes act and potentially interact to shape viral phylogenies. Since the term was coined in 2004, research on viral phylodynamics has focused on transmission dynamics in an effort to shed light on how these dynamics impact viral genetic variation. Transmission dynamics can be considered at the level of cells within an infected host, individual hosts within a population, or entire populations of hosts.
Sarah Cleaveland is a veterinary surgeon and Professor of Comparative Epidemiology at the University of Glasgow.
Peter William Harold Holland is a zoologist whose research focuses on how the evolution of animal diversity can be explained through evolution of the genome. He is the current Linacre Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.
Bacterial phylodynamics is the study of immunology, epidemiology, and phylogenetics of bacterial pathogens to better understand the evolutionary role of these pathogens. Phylodynamic analysis includes analyzing genetic diversity, natural selection, and population dynamics of infectious disease pathogen phylogenies during pandemics and studying intra-host evolution of viruses. Phylodynamics combines the study of phylogenetic analysis, ecological, and evolutionary processes to better understand of the mechanisms that drive spatiotemporal incidence and phylogenetic patterns of bacterial pathogens. Bacterial phylodynamics uses genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in order to better understand the evolutionary mechanism of bacterial pathogens. Many phylodynamic studies have been performed on viruses, specifically RNA viruses which have high mutation rates. The field of bacterial phylodynamics has increased substantially due to the advancement of next-generation sequencing and the amount of data available.
Edward Charles Holmes is a British evolutionary biologist and virologist. Since 2012, he has been a fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) in Australia and professor at the University of Sydney. He was an honorary visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, from 2019-2021.
Sharon Jayne Peacock is a British microbiologist who is Professor of Public Health and Microbiology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. Peacock also sits on Cambridge University Council.
Keith A. Crandall is an American computational biologist, bioinformaticist, and population geneticist at George Washington University, where he is the founding director of the Computational Biology Institute, and professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.
Loeske E. B. KruukFRS is an evolutionary ecologist who is a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Edinburgh. She was awarded the 2018 European Society for Evolutionary Biology President's Award. In 2023, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.