People

Dr Nardus Mollentze

Nardus joined the lab as a postdoc in 2018 and specializes in large scale, quantitative analyses of infectious disease data, with a focus on emerging viruses. He is building forecasting models for rabies using epidemiological and viral genomic data.

Dr Jocelyn Pérez Lazo

Jocelyn is a Peruvian vet and virologist who joined the lab in 2021. Her role involves establishing a captive bat colony in Peru and conducting experiments to understand rabies virus infection in bats and the relationship between of physiological stress and RNA virus shedding. She is also monitoring wild bat colonies to study the frequency and duration of rabies epizootics.

Dr Rita Ribeiro

Rita is a veterinary epidemiologist who joined the lab in 2021. She is interested in ecological modelling and the prevention and control of zoonotic diseases. Collaborating with Jason Mathiopoulos, Rita is working on innovative landscape-level models of vampire bat distribution and connectivity in Peru using animal-borne GPS and geolocated bat roosts and attacks on livestock.

Dr Frédéric Touzalin

Fred is a vet by training and has been affiliated with the lab since 2023, having been awarded a Dorothy Collaborative Research Fellowship at University College Dublin. He is working on the influence of environmental and anthropogenic factors on the demography of bat populations in Brittany (France). He is interested in developing an approach for assessing the health of wild species, particularly bats, based on integrating longitudinal demographic and environmental data, immunological markers, microbial diversity and transcriptomics.

Portrait by Ed Binkley (https://www.edbinkley.com/), all rights reserved.

Haris Malik

Haris joined us in October 2021 after receiving a Carnegie PhD Scholarship. His PhD explored the molecular epidemiology of a betaherpesvirus candidate vector for a transmissible rabies vaccine. His postdoc will carry out in vitro and in vivo work to further test the suitability of herpesvirus vectors in bats.

I-Ting Tu

I-Ting joined the group in 2023 through the Wellcome Trust Integrative Infection Biology Programme. She is investigating viral exchange at the marine-terrestrial interface, specifically vampire bats as a potential reservoir, transmitting viruses to their prey species, including South American fur seals, sea lions and domestic pigs.

Bailey Atkinson

Bailey joined the group in 2024 through the CVR PhD Programme. He is investigating viral exchange at the interface between bats and livestock with a particular focus on morbilliviruses. His project will involve a combination of machine learning on viral genomes, field studies and serology.

Alice Broos

Alice joined the group as a technician in 2014 and is currently the Lab Manager. She effectively runs the wet lab, with expertise in everything we do.

Elizabeth Wignall-Fleming

Elizabeth joined the group as a technician in 2025 to generate high throughput neutralization assays for serological detection of virus exposures.