We have two new academic appointments starting at the beginning of the 2018/19 academic year.

• Erin Gorsich will be joining us in September from Colorado State. She will take up an Assistant Professor position in Life Sciences supported by the Quantitative Biomedicine Programme.

• Xavier Didelot will be joining us in October from Imperial Collage. He will be a full Professor jointly between Statistics and Life Sciences.

ERIN GORSICH

Erin's current work investigates the national-scale spread of avian influenza in wild waterfowl. This work is in collaboration with scientists at the USDA and USGS. She is enjoying working as a quantitative ecologist in this interdisciplinary team.

Erin completed her PhD in January 2014 with Anna Jolles at Oregon State University. As a Ph.D. student, she studied bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis in African buffalo. This work involved wildlife capture, laboratory based disease testing and immunological assays, and the development of a model to understand the consequences of co-infection on disease dynamics.

XAVIER DIDELOT

Xavier's research is focused on the analysis of genomic data in order to improve our understanding of bacterial evolution, epidemiology, ecology and pathogenicity. A key aim is to develop new bioinformatics and statistical methods that can handle the very large amounts of data made available by novel high-throughput sequencing techniques.

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of his work, he has broad interests in a variety of subjects, including theoretical topics such as mathematical population genetics, Bayesian statistics or Monte-Carlo methods, and biological topics such as bacterial evolutionary processes or pathogen epidemiology.

Xavier has worked on a wide range of bacterial pathogens, especially those causing healthcare associated infections (eg Clostridium difficile and Staphylococcus aureus) and gastrointestinal infections (eg Salmonella enterica, Bacillus cereus, Campylobacter jejuni and Helicobacter pylori).