Suspected detection of H5 strain of bird flu in WA, which would be first in Australia www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06...

Reminder that the abstract deadline for EEID Asia Pacific 2026 is in two days on June 19th! Submit abstracts and register here: eeid-asiapacific.org

We have concluded successfully concluded negotiations on Australia’s association to Horizon Europe. Together, our researchers will drive progress in clean tech, digital transformation, health and climate resilience. More: link.europa.eu/tbK4xj

The Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease Conference (EEID) has made its way to the Asia-Pacific! Come join us in Hobart to open this new chapter and build capacity and networks in the region: eeid-asiapacific.org

🦠 Avian influenza is a term that lots of us have heard, sometimes in scary scenarios. In Antarctica and on sub-antarctic islands, avian influenza is currently rearing its ugly head.

Fantastic to see expert-curated and transparently governed pathogen sequence databases move so quickly to meet this moment.

Come join our great team! careers.utas.edu.au/cw/en/job/50...

Great write up of our study showing that both extrinsic factors (e.g. habitat availability) and intrinsic traits (e.g. body mass and diet) play important roles in shaping patterns of genomic diversity in birds 🦜 🧬 🌏 #consgen #popgen

🦇 Two PhD positions available on our new ARC Discovery Grant: "From Diversity to Disease: Viral Ecology, Evolution and Persistence in Bats" The project will investigate how viral diversity evolves and persists, with a particular focus on recently discovered henipaviruses in Australian flying foxes.

📢Health alert: #JapaneseEncephalitis virus detected in mosquitos in rural Victoria (Horsham), the first detection in the 2025/26 season Protect yourself: ✔️ Repellent ✔️ Cover up ✔️ Avoid dawn/dusk bites Free vaccine for high-risk groups More info: bit.ly/4omYE0l

On Oct 1, 2025, GISAID informed us that they had ended updates to the flat file of SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences and associated metadata that we had used to update Nextstrain analyses since Feb 2020. GISAID's stated rationale was that their "resources are limited". 1/5

📢 We have an open position for a postdoc to join my lab. It's a great position @animecol-uu.bsky.social, fully salaried for 2.5 years with all benefits. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/... The project is about transmission patterns of bacteria and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in aquatic insects. 🧬🦠 (1/3)

Please consider signing this petition to save the UTS public health program and our colleagues. Public health is so important and our colleagues deserve better! chng.it/b7yV6tywPd

New paper alert 🎉 We explore the origins of deltaviruses and find they have infected and co-evolved with termites for 141 million years 🐜🕑🦴 This was a fascinating story to work on with @ariskatzourakis.bsky.social, Jose Gabriel and @anselmojiro.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Dengue disease severity in humans is augmented by waning Japanese encephalitis virus immunity www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Do you mentor scientific writing, or use written assignments in the science courses you teach? Do you find mentoring/teaching writing hard, or time consuming? (Because it is!) Our new book can help, and it's getting close to being in your hands.

We have a new paper out on the evolutionary arms race between tuberculosis and #MHC mediated immunity in meerkats, using over ~20 years worth of data from wild meerkats. Led by Nadine Müller-Klein, Dom Melville and Simone Sommer. Link below! #DiseaseEcology

v1.0.0 of CoinfectionSimulator.jl is out! I think I'm starting to get a feel for coding in #JuliaLang style. You can use this simulator to model multiple directly transmitted infections in a host population, including different disease types and interactions between them. github.com/japilo/Coinf...

I had a great time at the Australian One Health CDC's One Health Symposium. So nice to engage with a passionate group of people progressing One Health ideas in Aus and beyond.

New Perspective 👇 Precision ecology for targeted conservation action www.nature.com/articles/s41... Spake et al. argue that applied ecologists should draw on insight from medicine and marketing to provide decision-makers with specific, site-level intervention strategies

Wow.. its probably been over a year since this one was submitted, but its finally out! Herein we review HPAI across South America (and discuss the threat to Antarctic, prior to its arrival). 👉 conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Important work from Tavis Anderson and our Penn-CEIRR USDA colleagues: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

First global pandemic treaty agreed — without the US www.nature.com/articles/d41...

First death of a person with Japanese encephalitis in NSW since 2022. If you live, work or holiday in regions west of Great Dividing Range, prevent mosquito bites. Check NSW Health website https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20250225_01.aspx

Check out our new method for summarising BEAST trees. The CCD0-MAP tree gives much more accurate results than MCC tree. It returns the tree that maximises the product of sampled clade probabilities regardless of whether that tree was sampled. Highly recommend :) journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

This paper looks great - excited to try it out!

Super happy our paper on #eDNA #metabarcoding of North Sea fish using @nanoporetech.com sequencing is finally published in Molecular Ecology Resources: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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