Andrew Dobson

Andrew Dobson is a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. He also holds an adjunct position in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton. He also serves as director of undergraduate studies. He is a senior fellow at Butler College and serves on the University Committees on Resources and Athletics and Student Life. He is an associate of the Royal College of Science UK, and a member of several groups, including the Common Room, Wolfson College, Oxford, the British Ecological Society, the British Society for Parasitology, the American Ecological Society, the Society for Natural Resource Modelling, the Society for Conservation Biology, and the Wildlife Disease Association. His research is concerned with the population ecology of infectious diseases and the conservation of endangered and threatened species. Over the last eight years he has studied infectious diseases in a variety of endangered and fragile ecosystems.



Population Dynamics of Emerging Avian Infectious Pathogens
Birds harbor a significant number of pathogens that have the potential to cross species boundaries and create new epidemics in humans, wildlife and domestic livestock. We have been studying an emerging bacterial pathogen of North American House Finches; it provides an ideal model system for understanding the interactions between ecological and evolutionary factors that shape the dynamics of emerging pathogens. We can examine these dynamics at a diversity of spatial and temporal scales: the interaction of the bacteria and the immune system in the eyes of individually infected birds up to the community level impact at the scale of the US continent.