PhD Studentship: The call of the wild: innovative technology to record and understand wild animal behaviour

Overview

This doctoral research project addresses the challenge of understanding how pathogens are transmitted within wildlife populations and between animals and their environments. Emerging infectious diseases threaten the health of wildlife, livestock, humans, and ecosystems, but the complex transmission pathways remain poorly understood. The research integrates environmental and host-associated metagenomic data with machine learning approaches to identify patterns of pathogen transmission in species such as migratory birds and badgers. The work combines genomic, ecological, and environmental datasets to develop predictive models that detect transmission hotspots, identify environmental reservoirs, and forecast pathogen spread under changing conditions.

The project pursues three primary objectives through high throughput metagenomic sequencing and computational modeling. First, it characterises microbial and pathogen diversity in model wildlife populations and associated environmental samples including water, soil, sediment, and foraging habitats. Second, it identifies transmission pathways and ecological drivers by linking microbial community composition to host traits, movement behaviour, habitat use, seasonality, and environmental conditions. Third, it develops machine learning pipelines involving preprocessing, feature engineering, and model selection to infer transmission networks and predict pathogen occurrence, persistence, and spread across landscapes.

What you get

The studentship provides funding for tuition fees and an annual stipend of £21,805 per annum for the 2026/7 academic year. The funding is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Doctoral Landscape Award.

Key dates

The closing date for applications is 2026-12-08.