Dr David Redding

I am a Research Leader in Biodiversity and Health at the Natural History Museum, where I explore how environmental change alters the relationships between people, animals, and pathogens. My research focuses on understanding the ecological, social, and climatic drivers of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases, with the goal of informing more effective strategies for prediction, prevention, and control.

I use a combination of Bayesian statistics, spatial modelling, and machine learning/AI methods to investigate how land-use transformation, climate change, and biodiversity patterns shape disease risk across different contexts. A core aim of my work is to develop decision-support tools that can help public health systems anticipate and respond to disease threats using ecological knowledge. While much of my research contributes to understanding the conditions under which new zoonotic diseases may emerge, I am also interested in broader aspects of environmental change and how these changes impact human societies, from pandemic risk and mental well-being through to the modification of sociological factors, such as language evolution.

My current projects include several international collaborations that combine ecological theory, local data, and advanced modelling approaches:

DTRA-NK – Working in northern Kenya to understand how livestock movement, habitat, and human behaviour interact to influence the risk of tick-borne diseases in pastoralist communities.

WARMR – An initiative creating an open-access platform for mapping infectious disease risk under climate change, enabling more transparent and scalable modelling.

Rodentpop – Studying how environmental change affects the ecology of Lassa fever in West Africa, with a focus on spillover dynamics and landscape-scale processes.

SENZOR – Developing a network-based early-warning system for zoonotic disease emergence, using social, ecological, and mobility data to identify potential hotspots.

SCAPES – Investigating how changes in land use and biodiversity modify ecosystem processes that influence the emergence of zoonotic pathogens.

Across all these projects, I aim to integrate ecological understanding with practical tools for use in health and conservation contexts. I’m always interested in hearing about new opportunities to collaborate—especially those that bring together data, modelling, and policy to address the complex health challenges of our changing planet.