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William P. Hanage, Harvard School of Public Health, USA

Bill Hanage studies the evolution and epidemiology of (mainly) bacterial pathogens. He did his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Bath, before a PhD at Imperial College London. This was then followed by postdoctoral work at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. In 2010 he joined the faculty at Harvard School of Public Health. He is especially interested in subjects that combine clinical importance with fundamental biological questions, such as how pathogens respond to novel selective pressures in the form of antimicrobials and vaccines, or the link between transmission and virulence. He has also worked extensively on the phenomenon of homologous recombination in bacteria, which shuffles genetic material among lineages, studying how it can be detected and its consequences for how things respond to selection, and indeed the very notion of species. Increasingly he is involved with population genomic analyses of large numbers of very closely related pathogen isolates, to probe in detail their patterns of transmission and diversification. He works both with culture flasks and computer simulations, and would hate to have to choose between them.

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