IRD-MIVEGEC (France)

Benjamin ROCHE

Senior Researcher, modeler

roche.ben@gmail.com

Benjamin Roche is a Research Director at the Research Institute for Development (IRD), based in Mexico City and Montpellier. He is focusing on understanding what key inter-disciplinary insights can be gleaned from bringing together the fields of evolutionary ecology and public health. To do so, he has studied how host and pathogen diversity may affect infectious disease transmission. He has also worked to understand the interactions between ecological and societal processes in pathogen propagation. Synergistically, he has also worked on the interactions between infectious diseases transmission and cancerous cells proliferation through the share of a common enemy (our immune system) at an individual scale. Finally, he has tried to understand how cancerogenesis may impact evolution of species life-history traits, and the potential consequences of cancer for the structure of ecological communities.

In coming years, he will pursue these efforts by understanding how both host and pathogen diversity, largely studied separately thus far, may interact and the potential impact of such interactions on public health outcomes. The unifying goal for all these research projects is to gain a better understanding of, and ideally find ways to help improve, public health situations in low-income countries.

https://www.mivegec.ird.fr/fr/component/content/article?id=1191&Itemid=&selected=356%20

Marie BOUILLOUD

PhD student (co-supervision CBGP /MIVEGEC)

marie.bouilloud@ird.fr

Marie Bouilloud’s PhD project aims to understand biodiversity/health relationships through the study of rodent communities and the zoonotic agents they transmit. To do this, she will study forest rodent communities along anthropisation gradients ranging from integral biological reserves to managed forests and forested urban parks in France, Until now, such studies used to focus on a single pathogen. Marie’s project aims to overcome this limitation by considering: i) the impact of coinfections on the epidemiology of certain zoonoses, ii) the interactions between the commensal bacterial gut flora and rodent susceptibility to zoonotic agents, and iii) the temporal variability (inter-season, inter-annual) of biodiversity/health relationships.

Audrey ARNAL

Post-doctoral fellow (MIVEGEC/CBGP)

au.arnal@gmail.com

Since the beginning of my career, I am focusing on understanding the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases through various empirical, experimental and conceptual approaches. My research aims to provide scientific evidence that will allow defining integrative strategies combining biological conservation and public health. My background is deeply rooted in interdisciplinarity, with recognized diplomas in Parasitology (MSc), Virology (University certificate), Medicine/Public Health (University certificate) and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (PhD), showing that I am able to produce relevant research in all these disciplines.