Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode Making Sense of 2020
MERS, Ebola, and COVID-19—the viruses that cause these diseases likely have the same patient zero: bats. For researcher Daniel Streicker, the key to preventing an outbreak is the bats themselves. A version of this segment was originally heard in the episode, Inoculation.
About Daniel Streicker
Ecologist Daniel Streicker focuses his research on animal-borne diseases. He is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and head of the Streicker Group at the University of Glasgow Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine and the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research.
His researchuses a range of approaches including longitudinal field studies in wild bats, phylodynamics, machine learning, metagenomicsand epidemiological modeling.
In 2013, Streicker was awarded the Science and SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists for his work on the transmission of the vampire bat rabies virus in Peru. He received his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Georgia.
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