Würzburg Life Science Seminar: Jan Gogarten

Dr Jan Gogarten - “Expanding the One Health practitioner’s toolkit for work at human-wildlife interfaces: from flies to phages”

The emergence of pathogens from ecosystems can have drastic consequences for humans, but infectious diseases also play a critical role in regulating wildlife populations. Jan Gogarten is a wildlife disease ecologist who aims to understand processes that influence and maintain animal and microbial diversity in ecosystems, while developing strategies to understand and mitigate disease emergence in human and wildlife populations. To this end, he has developed an environmental DNA toolkit for studying hosts and pathogens at landscape scales. His work includes studies on bacterial communities in primate guts, the viruses that infect these bacteria, and communities of flies that form long-term associations with social groups and potentially serve as disease vectors.