About us
Vector-borne diseases, in which infection is spread by insects, ticks, and mites, affect the health of humans, animals, and plants. They include diseases which may sound familiar like Lyme disease, Bluetongue, and Louping Ill, and new infections like Usutu virus.
Over the next 20 years, risk of these types of infections is predicted to increase in the UK.
It is critical that we establish the key networks and platforms needed to coordinate the UK's response to these looming threats. Formulating plans to prevent and control vector-borne diseases is complicated by the fact that their transmission cycles often involve not only vectors but also several domestic and wildlife animal species and are extremely dependent on environmental conditions.
One Health VBD Hub is a non-profit open-source project funded by UKRI and Defra. The aim of the project is to improve the accessibility and sharing of information about the infectious agents, hosts, and vectors involved in vector-borne disease transmission in the UK. To accomplish this the project will:
- Build new infrastructure that allows researchers working across different vector and pathogen species and ecological, veterinary, and medical contexts to combine their knowledge to deliver more coordinated responses to vector-borne disease threats
- Develop new tools to help understand the relationship between our environment and vector-borne disease transmission and predict how changes in the environment will impact risk going forward
- Support the sharing of data and findings on these diseases among the UK research community and with policymakers.
In the end, the project will deliver a platform and network for dealing with UK vector-disease threats.
Lauren Cator researches the role of mosquito behaviour and ecology in disease transmission at Imperial College London. Lauren is leading with Hub and is responsible for overall project management and coordination of the Hub team and also engagement with the wider UK VBD research community.
Marion England researches spatial epidemiology and vector ecology at The Pirbright Institute. She brings expertise in a wide range of VBDs including blue tongue and leishmaniasis as well as GIS to the project.
Robert Jones is an entomologist at LSHTM and director of social impact at Arctech Innovation. He is coordinating between the UK VBD data hub and the Global Vector Hub, an open access platform for networking and resource sharing.
Sarah Kelly is the data curator for the Hub. She predominantly focuses on relationship building with data depositors and data wrangling of vector abundance data. For the last 9 years Sarah has worked as part of the VectorBase and ClinEpiDB team at VEuPathDB funded by NIAID, curating both entomological and epidemiological data. When she isn’t curating data you will find her running, swimming and cycling around the coastline and camping on hilltops.
Stanislav Modrak is the software engineer behind the Hub platform based at the Imperial College London. He has previously worked on risk analysis and compliance in cryptocurrency markets, digital bureaucracy and e-government platforms.
Francis Windram is a PDRA on the VBD Hub at Imperial College London. He predominantly focuses on creating tooling and visualisation for disease vector trait and population data. During his PhD, Francis worked on designing new computational imaging and trait extraction methods for the webs of UK orb-weaving spiders. Aside from science, Francis is also an avid musician, climber, and general nature lover.
Samraat Pawar studies how individual-level metabolism scales up through species (population) interactions to community- and ecosystem-level dynamics at Imperial College London. Samraat is supporting integration of existing repositories with the Hub and the development of software for working with the data.
Will Pearse develops new statistical and computational tools to answer fundamental questions about the origins and future of biodiversity, and applies those insights to improve human wellbeing at Imperial College London. In this project, Will is focussed on how best to link environmental data with other types of biological data important for understanding VBD transmission.
Chris Sanders’ research focuses on the physiological and behavioural attributes that enable an insect species to transmit a pathogen – known as its ‘vector capacity’. He brings expertise in field sampling, virology, and using environmental data for forecasting vector incursion and transmission risk to the Hub project.
Hannah Vineer’s expertise is in veterinary parasites, how they exist within the wider ecological community, and the impacts of weather, climate, host interactions and human behaviour on parasite populations and transmission. Hannah uses mathematical and statistical models to predict how parasite populations and transmission varies geographically and seasonally, with the aim of generating knowledge and tools to help inform veterinary policies and improve parasite control. She bring expertise in One Health perspectives to the project.
Steven White is a theoretical ecologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, specialising in modelling population dynamics and species spread using mathematical and simulation models, tackling topics in vector-borne disease epidemiology and control. Steven is supporting the development of forecasting tools.
Zofie Cheah is an MSc student in Drug Discovery and Pharma Management at UCL, specialising in biochemistry and supporting the Hub with data curation and outreach.
- Imperial College - New hub to gather data on diseases spread by mosquitoes, ticks and other vectors
- Pirbright Institute - Pirbright joins hub to tackle vector-borne diseases
- CEH - Gathering data on diseases spread by mosquitoes, ticks and other vectors
- University of Liverpool - New hub to gather data on diseases spread by mosquitoes, ticks and other vectors
- UKRI - Defra-UKRI One Health VBD Hub
- UKRI - UKRI and Defra invest £7 million to fight vector-borne disease
- Animal Plant Health Agency - Additional funding for research on diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks