Andrew Cunningham

Andrew's area of research aims to identify disease threats to wildlife conservation and how to prevent or mitigate these. This includes the mitigation of human-driven disease transmission (or spill-over) between species, including from wild animals to people.

Andrew works on wildlife health to reduce threats to wildlife conservation, to bring rare species threatened with disease back from the brink of extinction and to improve human-wildlife co-existence.

Andrew's current projects include investigating the emergence, spread, impact and mitigation of disease threats to wildlife conservation, understanding the role of anthropogenic environmental change on wildlife disease emergence and identifying factors which lead to zoonotic spill-over. Since his work on identifying ranaviral and chytrid fungal as pathogens threatening amphibians, much of his work is still focused on amphibian health and conservation. For example, amphibian taxa, he currently works to conserve include mountain chicken frogs (since 2002), Darwin’s frogs (since 2009) and Chinese giant salamanders (since 2010). Since 2007, he has worked with colleagues in Ghana and Cambridge University to understand the ecology of zoonotic pathogens infecting African bats and to identify risk factors for zoonotic spill-over.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Andrew has been increasingly involved in policy engagement to mainstream biodiversity conservation within the public health sector. For example, since its inception in 2021, he has been a member of the WHO/WOAH/FAO/UNEP One Health High Level Expert Panel which has an advisory role to the United Nations partner agencies on One Health-related matters to support improved cooperation among governments and provide evidence-based scientific and policy advice to address the challenges raised by One Health. Recently, he was an external advisor on One Health to the G7 and he provided advice to the G7-mandated One Health Intelligence Scoping Study and to PREZODE (Preventing Zoonotic Disease Emergence), an international initiative to better understand the risks of emergence of zoonotic infectious diseases, their prevention and their early detection.

Andrew is also a member of the Eklipse Expert Working Group on Biodiversity and Pandemics, and he is a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on One Health implementation in Europe.