My 1st first-author paper is out as a preprint! Excited to share the fascinating story of marine-feeding vampire bats 🌊🦇 We found that marine-diet bats were exposed to #H5#AvianFlu 🦠 from marine wildlife and could potentially spread it to livestock via blood feed🩸 doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.09.686930

Excited to share that our paper on the relationship between viral load and metagenomic outputs in wildlife samples is now published in Microbial Genomics @microbiologysociety! 🎉 Fantastic collaboration with a brilliant team. More info: 📖 tinyurl.com/ywb7tvjm

Sometimes you meet absolutely incredible bioinfo-magicians. It was a huge privilege when @shenwei356.bsky.social joined our group for a year on an @embl.org sabbatical. While here, he developed a new way of aligning to millions of bacteria, called LexicMap 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Will a #virus spillover into a new host species lead to dead-end infection or sustained #epidemic? This study uses a nematode-virus model to show that early #spillover traits, especially infection prevalence & shedding, are important predictors of viral persistence @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3UCnZHp

🦇 NEW RESEARCH: Our 3-year study of Australian flying foxes identified six co-circulating coronaviruses, with highest rates of infection and co-infection in young bats, and evidence of circulating recombinants 🧪🌏 🧵 Available open access in @natcomms.nature.com 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New in @science.org We built a safe, atomic-resolution version of the Powassan virus—a deadly tick-borne #flavivirus with no vaccine. ✅ First structure ever ✅ Safe to handle (BSL-2) ✅ Platform for vaccines & antivirals Let me show you 🧵 (1/5) Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Are you doing a PhD or research Masters in Virology? Want to be part of a community of like-minded researchers from across the UK and Ireland? We're excited to announce the first annual conference run by and for postgraduate research students in Virology. Please sign up, and please spread the word!

Interested in metagenomic virus discovery but don't know where to start? In collaboration with CERI and a group of virus discovery experts from around the world, we'll be running a 5 day hands-on workshop in virus discovery. Find out more here: climade.health/2025/06/22/m...

New from The Strain Team: 🎊 Springer Nature Discovers MDPI 🎊 Springer Nature has spawned a copycat journal series called "Discover" mimicking #MDPI journal titles and citation behaviours. We even made a browser game to prove it (see 🔗). Gross! 😀 1/n #ResearchIntegrity #SciPub #AcademicSky

We have a job going for a bioinformatician / computational biologist at the CVR in Glasgow. www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/computat...

Ecology and evolutionary trajectories of morbilliviruses in Neotropical bats www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣🚨📣Deadline extended to 6th June 2025! 📣🚨📣 Applications are still open for our MSc+PhD scholarships in Ecological Data Science available to those from underrepresented groups. This offers fully funded MSc (full UK fees and UKRI stipend) followed by entry to our 4-year PhD programme.

Postdoc (Washington DC, USA) Rodent-borne virus risk in heterogeneous landscapes with @clfaust.bsky.social @jraghwani.bsky.social @bahanbug.bsky.social at @ox.ac.uk @uofglasgow.bsky.social @royalvetcollege.bsky.social @ilri.org... More details: http://iddjobs.org/jobs/2307

BTO's Hugh Hanmer, Senior Research Ecologist, is a speaker at this webinar where he'll be discussing the decline in Blackbirds in the UK and the spread of Usutu virus. Sign up to attend on the link below. ⬇️

📣 We’re hiring! 2-yr postdoc at Smithsonian’s NZCBI on an NSF-funded project with partners incl. Glasgow, RVC, Uganda MOH, Cary Institute. Focus: land use change, rodent movement, human-rodent contact, modeling disease risk, w/ plenty of fieldwork in Uganda. Details: tinyurl.com/SINSFR

New preprint from Luke Snell from GSTT, Suzanne Pickering in my lab and Rui Galao, my colleague at KCL. Here we examine in detail the evolution of the SARS CoV-2 spike in persistent infections, and essentially catch a potential variant in the act of developing. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just over a week left to the London Infection Ecology Network event at the RVC with a fantastic list of speakers. For further info and to grab your tickets: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/london-inf...

📣 Excited annouce that the next London Infection Ecology Network (LIEN)🦠🌎🧪🌳🌤️ in-person event is taking place on April 30th at the RVC (Camden)! If you’d like to attend, please register for a free ticket via Eventbrite: 🔗 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/london-inf...

We compared gut microbiota across >800 lab and wild house mice. Wild mice have more diverse, aerotolerant, and dynamic microbiotas than their lab counterparts. See our latest paper here: bmcmicrobiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... #gutmicrobiome #musmusculus #wildmice

EXCITING NEWS🥳! @isme-microbes.bsky.social is now sponsoring 3 travels grants worth EUR 500 each to support early career researchers presenting at the #RdRpSummit2025. Abstract submissions & registrations are still open!✍️ More info at RdRp.io

We are excited to announce a support scheme for ECRs wishing to attend ESEB 2025 and participate in the WAME-sponsored symposium “Contribution of the microbiome to host adaptation and plasticity” See here for more details and please share! www.wamestn.com/eseb-2025

Did you know coronavirus infections impact the gut microbial community of #bats? But the effect differs between viruses. Published in @ismepublications.bsky.social - Big team effort: @alice-risely.bsky.social @cdrosten.bsky.social @vmcorman.bsky.social et al. academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

We're looking for a PhD student to join us at Vilnius University in Lithuania. We work on RNA virus evolution computationally but we'd like to generate more mosquito RNA virus sequence data. Official ad: www.gmc.vu.lt/en/doctoral-.... Please share & continue reading if interested.

New in Nature Comms: We applied metagenomic + targeted NGS to serum from febrile patients in Uganda. Post-COVID, LMICs have sequencing infrastructure that could be repurposed for pathogen discovery. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Prior experience with #phylodynamic analyses is also required. Details are coming soon. #jobsearch #diseaseecology #epidemiology #AvianInfluenza #BirdFlu

There is a #postdoc position opportunity to work on #HPAI in France and Cambodia (fieldwork with Institut Pasteur du Cambodge). The qualifications and experience required are #disease #evolution, epidemiology, or related disciplines.

How does land use impact disease spillover? 🌍🦠 Join the "Land Health: Preventing Zoonoses Spillover" webinar on March 5 & hear #RESTOREID partner @clfaust.bsky.social discuss biodiversity, agriculture & disease risk. 📅 Join here: buff.ly/Il0EGeA #OneHealth ‪@cp-trendsparasitol.bsky.social‬

Fieldwork opportunity: We're looking to hire a field assistant for the www.phenoweb.org project starting 1 April. Please repost. #phenology #fieldwork #birdringing

Our next #IFEEAI webinar speaker is @lhmoncla.bsky.social , Assistant Professor @upenn.edu Title: Intensive transmission in wild, migratory birds drove rapid geographic dissemination and repeated spillovers of #H5N1 #birdflu into agriculture in North America.

New paper led by Rohan Simkin exploring global patterns of zoonotic hosts in the wildland-urban interface. WUIs are a complex and expanding contact zone with many potential host species that are likely to be consequential for spillover transmission on a rapidly urbanizing planet. bit.ly/WUI-zdx

Just over week until the deadline👇

New paper alert!! 🚨🚨 And it's on the coolest (and most mysterious 🕵️) group of viruses I've worked on so far! With Sej Modha we uncovered >800 new anellovirus genomes from human metagenomes and looked for clues on these tiny, elusive viruses biology! academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...

Here we provide evidence of henipaviruses in North America with the discovery of Camp hill virus in the Northern Short-Tailed Shrew, Alabama. Early release article available from EID wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/... #virology

Happy that this paper - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... - was accepted at Mol Ecol Res and excited about the promise of this technology to measure pop sizes for such elusive species as snow leopards + learn about at least 1st-degree relationships + beyond? Congrats to Katie Solari and other authors!

Please share this postdoc position based at the Royal Vet College working on a very cool US-UK EEID project with some wonderful people: @jraghwani.bsky.social + Christina Faust, James Hassell, Oli Pybus, Dan Streicker, Sarah Knowles. Reach out to Jayna directly for questions and details.

Please share widely! We are recruiting a 3-year postdoc at the RVC to develop new methodology to infer epidemic dynamics from wild animal viromes sampled across changeable environments. Further details: jobs.rvc.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx... Feel free to reach out with any questions. Deadline Feb 9th

🚨 New preprint alert 🚨 We searched for the presence of coronaviruses in >200 bat individuals across Spain 🦠🦇. We recovered 6 complete coronavirus genomes, including 3 novel species. One of them could use bat and human ACE2 for entry. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Really proud to share our preprint describing early adaptation of H5N1 to US dairy cattle, and showing how these mutations enhance the ability of the virus to infect other mammals, such as pigs and humans. With @influenzal.bsky.social @vidhid.bsky.social @drclairesmith.bsky.social and many more!

Our collaborative work with our Brazilian partners was dropped. www.cell.com/iscience/ful.... Great work by Dr Hendy and the team. @createneo.bsky.social @bahanbug.bsky.social @mauriciolnogueira.bsky.social

Incredibly excited to share that our manuscript was just published in @nature.com ! What a way to start the new year! 🎉 https://buff.ly/4gyYCzx We present phylowave, a framework that enables to learn the fitness dynamics of pathogens from phylogenies. 🧵 A thread... 1/n #IDSky #IDModelling

Phage coexistence, even when you least expect it. Check out @norapyenson.bsky.social's study showing the repeated assembly of diverse phage communities: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Also Nora's bsky thread here: bsky.app/profile/nora... #SocialViruses #virosky #evosky 🧪🦠

Interested in improving virus surveillance in wildlife and domestic animals? We have two open positions at the RVC👇 Please reach out if you have any questions!

Do you or your promising undergrad/Master's student have an interest in mathematical modelling, parasitology, sustainable agriculture, with great opportunities for knowledge exchange? Then look at this PhD project with @daveewing.bsky.social and us folks at Moredun! www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

A thread🧵 on application systems for postdoc jobs in the UK (applies to my university, but I've seen others and they're similar). I have seen (too many times) good applicants who don't seem to understand how recruitment is done on our side - not their fault! it's a privilege! - so here's how

My lab is recruiting a postdoc to work on virus transmission. Must have publications in aerosol science or atmospheric chemistry, interest in working with viruses, and be able to travel 6x/year, up to 2 weeks at a time. They can be based at Virginia Tech or at Emory University in Atlanta. /1

How fast are viruses spreading in the wild? Check out our latest study now published in @plosbiology.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1371/jour.... A study performed with Paul Bastide, Pauline Rocu, Denis Fargette, Olivier Hardy, @msuchard.bsky.social, @stephaneguindon.bsky.social, and Philippe Lemey (1/7)

Interested in fitness consequences of the gut microbiome in the wild? Keen on being involved with an iconic long-term study system? Check out a PhD opportunity working on Soay sheep microbiomes! Info below and feel free to contact with q's. e4-dtp.ed.ac.uk/e5-dtp/super...

Thanks everyone who came to our first event at NHM! We had fantastic talks from Kate Jones (@profkatej.bsky.social), Sarah Hill, Andres Valenzuela-Sanchez & Natalie Imirzian, from zoonoses and viral genomes, to frogs and drones. We're back in February at UCL @ucl-pnl.bsky.social - watch this space 🦟

great #PhD opportunity in #disease #ecology - which species are key for #tick-borne disease transmission in the UK? Combining genetics, community ecology, mathematical modelling



 @uofgsbohvm.bsky.social & @ukceh.bsky.social International applicants - contact me by 9th Dec tinyurl.com/wfuak5se

#PhD Advert: Please share! Are you looking for a PhD studentship in comparative- or population-genomics, using 300+ species of #Drosophila and 1000+ genomes of #melanogaster? #Entomology #Genomics #PopGen #Phylogenetics