Andrew Alexander Cunningham

Professor Andrew Cunningham has a Bachelor’s degree in Veterinary Medicine and Surgery from the University of Glasgow and a PhD in amphibian epidemiology from the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. Professor Cunningham is the Deputy Director of Science at the Zoological Society of London, where he has worked since 1988, initially as veterinary pathologist and, most recently, as Professor of Wildlife Epidemiology.

He investigates infectious and non-infectious disease threats to wildlife conservation, including disease ecology and the drivers of disease emergence and zoonotic spill-over. He has published > 400 scientific articles, including primary data and reviews on wildlife disease and emerging infectious diseases, including a seminal paper on emerging infectious disease threats to biodiversity and public health which was published in Science in 2000. He discovered a new epidemic ranaviral disease of amphibians in Europe and he published the first definitive report of the global extinction of a species by an infectious disease.

He has led several international and multi-disciplinary wildlife disease research projects, including the investigation of vulture declines in South Asia and the international team that discovered the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis as a cause of global amphibian declines. Since 2007 he has co-led investigations to understand the ecology of zoonotic pathogens in their natural chiropteran hosts and risk factors for zoonotic spill-over and disease emergence. He is a member of DEFRA’s GB Wildlife Disease Surveillance Partnership and he led the team that discovered a novel disease causing greenfinch declines in the UK. In 2010, he won a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award for his work on zoonotic viruses in African bats, a project which he continues to co-lead with colleagues in the Universities of Ghana and Cambridge and in 2016 he was awarded Fellowship of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons for meritorious contributions to knowledge.