David is Director of the recently established Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance and holds a faculty position within the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. David's group have a focus on applied public health bioinformatic research and genomic epidemiology. David graduated with a BSc in Biochemistry (Salford) and a MSc in Neuroscience (Institute of Psychiatry, KCL). After working in the web industry for a period, David took up a position at Imperial College London within the group of Professor Brian Spratt and undertook a part-time PhD in Bioinformatics. Focusing on the molecular epidemiology of bacterial pathogens, David has been developing translational bioinformatics methods and tools for public health, for example Multilocus Sequence Typing for the identification of bacterial clones, generic mobile data gathering, spatial data visualisation and comparative genomics. Within The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance, broad aims are to provide data and tools for local, national and international utility focused on antimicrobial resistance and genomic surveillance. We are addressing the utility of large-scale structured pathogen surveys to provide contextual WGS datasets and population structure. Key aims are to enable the identification of high risk clones of public health importance, their risk assessment (eg resistance, virulence and transmissibility) and ultimately management. Toolsets include www.wgsa.net for the processing of whole genome assemblies and EpiCollect for generic metadata gathering. EpiCollect allow groups / individuals / organizations to get up and running with mobile data gathering as quickly and easily as possible. Projects people have set up range from simple surveys of wildlife and plants, through archaelogical dig sites and street art locations to the use by international organisations such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, for the tracking of animal and human pathogens in Africa, for Widespread vaccination campaigns (eg Rabies in India) and for tracking EBOLA in Liberia.

Infectious Disease