My research revolves around understanding how animal behaviour influences the transmission of diseases. In our human societies, the people who we spend the most time with (both at home or in the workplace) are likely to also be the people we blame when we catch a cold. The same applies to animals, except they have a myriad of different patterns of contact and diseases! I use social network models to map out 'who interacts with whom', and understand how individual behaviour shapes the transmission of diseases across populations. These questions help us understand more about how diseases circulate in populations, which is becoming more important as wildlife populations are increasingly threatened by diseases.
