While many of those working on emerging diseases expected a pandemic like COVID, and in many ways this one could have been much worse, there is now increased concern about how to prevent the next one.

Once a novel infection starts spreading in humans it is almost impossible to prevent a pandemic, so Professor Peter Hudson, a disease ecologist, will talk about our understanding of viral spillover from bats, and what we really could do, to stop the next pandemic.

Professor Peter Hudson is a disease ecologist who examines the impact of infectious diseases on wildlife populations. For the past 14 years he has been examining how infections move from one species to another and developing insights into how and why bats shed viruses that cause pandemics. He has shown how parasites cause population cycles and developed and tested other concepts including Parasite Mediated Competition, the Dilution Effect and the Healthy Herds Hypothesis.