Biography
James Wood is Head of the Department of Veterinary Medicine. He is a veterinary epidemiologist and joined the Department in Cambridge in 2005, initially as Director of the Cambridge Infectious Diseases Consortium, prior to appointment as Alborada Professor of Equine and Farm Animal Science in 2009. He studies the dynamics of emerging infectious diseases, including viral infections of fruit bats in West Africa, focused in Ghana, mammalian influenza, rabies and bovine tuberculosis. Funders include BBSRC, MRC and the Alborada Trust.
Research
James Wood is an epidemiologist in the Disease Dynamics Unit in Cambridge and conducts multidisciplinary research on infectious diseases, focussing on emerging infectious disease and control, with particular regard to ensuring that research impacts on policy. His research interests are focussed on One Health approaches to infectious disease emergence and its control, with research programmes based in UK, India, Ghana and Ethiopia. He is involved in collaborative studies of emergence of RNA viruses from fruit bats and control of bovine tuberculosis. He is one of the leaders of the Cambridge-Africa collaborative, capacity-building programme. He has numerous national and international collaborators. Professor Wood has published widely on infectious disease emergence and its drivers, including on viral diversity and zoonoses in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as on bovine TB transmission and its control in cattle. He has held research grants in excess of £25M, as well as capacity building partnership grants with African Institutions in excess of £7M.
Publications
Baker, K.S., Tachedjian, M., Barr, J., ….. Wood, J.L.N., Lin-Fa Wang (2020) Achimota Pararubulavirus 3: A New Bat-Derived Paramyxovirus of the Genus Pararubulavirus. Viruses 12 (11), 1236
Begeman, L., Suu-Ire, R.D., AC Banyard, C Drosten, ……., Thomas Müller, Wood, J.L.N., Cunningham, A.A. (2020) Experimental Lagos bat virus infection in straw-colored fruit bats: A suitable model for bat rabies in a natural reservoir species. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 14 (12), e0008898
Pollock, D.D., TA Castoe, BW Perry, S Lytras, KJ Wade, DL Robertson, Holmes, E.C., Boni, M.F., Kosakovsky Pond, S.L., Parry, R., Carlton, E.J., Wood, J.L.N., Pennings, P.S., Goldstein, R.A. (2020) Viral CpG deficiency provides no evidence that dogs were intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2. Molecular Biology and Evolution 37, 2706-10
Edao, B.M., G Ameni, Z Assefa, S Berg, AM Whatmore, Wood, J.L.N. (2020) Brucellosis in ruminants and pastoralists in Borena, Southern Ethiopia. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 14 (7), e0008461
Amponsah‐Mensah, K., Cunningham, A.A., Wood, J.L.N., Ntiamoa‐Baidu, Y. (2019) Seasonal variation in food availability and relative importance of dietary items in the Gambian epauletted fruit bat (Epomophorus gambianus). Ecology and evolution 9, 5683-5693
Redding, D.W., Atkinson, P.M., Cunningham, A.A., Lo Iacono, G., Moses, L.M., Wood, J.L.N. & Jones, K.E. (2019) Impacts of environmental and socio-economic factors on emergence and epidemic potential of Ebola in Africa. Nat Comms 10, 1-11
Glennon, E.E., Jephcott, F.L., Restif, O., Wood, J.L.N. (2019) Estimating undetected Ebola spillovers. PLoS neglected tropical diseases 13, e0007428
