Epidemiology seminars

Disease emergence reflects interacting changes in land use, intensive livestock production and biodiversity. This seminar brings those relationships together rather than treating each driver separately. It examines One Health and Planetary Health responses to health crises, then considers place-based approaches that use ecosystems and biodiversity, including community-managed forests.

Introduced species can affect human, animal and ecosystem health through altered ecological interactions, disease transmission and changes to food security or well-being. This seminar first examines those direct and indirect effects, then considers how pathogens and parasites influence invasion success and evolution. Invasive rodents provide a detailed example linking these mechanisms within a One Health framework.

This lecture examines how genetic predisposition interacts with environmental exposure in disease. It reviews methods for detecting these interactions, the role of large biobanks and examples including obesity. Gene regulation and environmentally influenced epigenetic changes provide possible molecular mechanisms.

This lecture examines traits and diseases influenced by many genetic variants. It introduces genome-wide association studies, pleiotropy and polygenic risk scores, then considers their use in precision medicine. Outstanding limitations include unexplained heritability and the uneven representation of human populations in genomic research.

Studies of families with inherited breast-cancer risk led to BRCA1 and subsequently many other susceptibility genes. This seminar examines how large-scale sequencing and population studies have refined tumour associations and penetrance estimates. It moves from a simple dominant-inheritance model toward multifactorial risk, considering genetic and environmental modifiers that could support individualized surveillance and management.

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a prevalent and disabling condition that affects larger numbers of children and adolescents worldwide. Until recently, we have understood little about the nature of PTSD reactions in our youngest children (aged under 8 years old). This talk describes our work over the last 15 years working with this very young age group. It overviews how we need a markedly different PTSD diagnosis for very young children, data on the prevalence of this new diagnostic algorithm, and the development of a psychological intervention and its evaluation in a clinical trial.