BRAD ZIEGLERAndrew Read’s interest in natural history and evolution began when he was a child growing up in New Zealand. The islands are home to many “strange and weird birds and animals,” he says; their uniqueness and diversity prompted him to think about how they came to be. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree from the University of Otago, Read moved to the University of Oxford to pursue graduate studies in bird evolution. There, his interests began to diverge from birds to something much smaller and faster-evolving: pathogens. The pace of infections enthralled him, and he recognized that by studying infectious disease, he could observe evolution in real time. “I’ve been working on them ever since,” he says. How pathogens evolve is fundamentally important to human health, he says, and such research could positively affect society. After a series of faculty positions, first at the University of Tromsø in Norway and then the University of Edinburgh, Read moved to the U.S. in 2007 to set up a lab at Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. Throughout his career, he’s pursued a variety of questions from a population-biology perspective, including why certain pathogens make us sicker than others, how pathogens compete within the same host, and what factors lead to drug resistance.
PETER KERRIn his early years as a practicing veterinarian, Peter Kerr had no intention of pursuing a career in research. “I thought I wanted to be a country veterinarian,” he says. “I loved working with animals.” But after working as a consultant to help control disease on pig farms, Kerr began to wonder how the same pathogen could be completely benign on one farm and cause rampant disease on another. To understand the answers to this question, Kerr knew he needed to arm himself with a solid background in molecular virology. This became the focus of his PhD studies at the Australian National University, and ultimately, “led me into this area of viral pathogenesis, of trying to understand how viruses cause disease,” he explains.
After completing his PhD, Kerr was recruited by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in 1990. There he spent 24 years pursuing his interest in viral virulence. He then moved to the University of Sydney, from which he officially retired at the end of last year. Unofficially, however, “I’m keeping busy.” Kerr is an honorary fellow at the Marie Bashir Institute at the University of Sydney, and since 2008, he’s been working with colleagues Andrew Read and Edward Holmes on questions surrounding the evolution of viral virulence.
In this issue, Read and Kerr delve into the evolution of ...
