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Research

The drive to build WOH grew from the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, a devastating illustration of how globalisation and human-to-animal contact have placed human health, food supply and economic stability under threat from infectious diseases. WOH will train students in innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to help minimise future impact of emerging infections, vector-borne diseases and antimicrobial resistance.

Research themes

The Wessex One Health (WOH) programme encompasses four themes - research projects can sit in more than one of these themes.

The Wessex One Health (WOH) Doctoral Landscape Award and themes therein build on a co-funded doctoral training programme called the Pathogens and Host Defences DTP, involving University of Surrey, University of Sussex, The Pirbright Institute and Dstl. This DTP began in October 2022 and recruited 20 PhD students across three cohorts, prior to the start of WOH. They are now joined by 15 PhD students in Cohort 1 of WOH.

Detection, prevention and intervention

To identify novel points of intervention for a wide range of pathogens, and train students in diagnostics and development of novel antimicrobials.

Microbial evolution and drug resistance

To investigate how pathogens evolve to become resistant to antimicrobials or jump species barriers.

Understanding disease spread

To focus on barriers to transmission and the effect of environmental changes on the spread of vectors and the exposure of animals and humans to novel pathogens.

Diagram showing key infectious-disease threat areas—food-borne diseases, zoonoses, emerging infections, antimicrobial resistance, and vector-borne diseases—surrounded by four themes: detection and intervention, microbial evolution, disease spread, and infection biology. Along the bottom, technologies used in WOH training are listed, including high containment, AI, imaging, bioinformatics, modelling, omics, and structural biology.