Who we are

Peter Daszak

Co-editor, EcoHealth Association Treasurer
Consortium for Conservation Medicine, Wildlife Trust, New York, NY, USA

Dr Peter Daszak is Executive Director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in Palisades , New York , a partnership between Harvard Medical School , Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, USGS National Wildlife Health Center and Wildlife Trust. The CCM is the first formal inter-institutional partnership to have conservation medicine research, education, policy and practice as core goals. A Ph.D parasitologist by training, Peter Daszak's research has been instrumental in revealing the impact of emerging diseases on wildlife populations. Collaborating with groups in the UK , Australia , and the USA , he identified the first case of a disease causing extinction of a species, discovered a disease responsible for amphibian population declines globally, and demonstrated the link between global trade and disease emergence via a process called "pathogen pollution". At the CCM, he directs a program of collaborative research and curricular development that focuses on our ecosystem-level understanding of disease and the links between anthropogenic environmental change and disease emergence. The CCM uses these case studies to objectively inform policy makers on the role of trade and other environmental changes in disease emergence, and to formulate practical, bottom-up, solutions to disease threats to biodiversity and human health. Dr Daszak holds adjunct positions at 3 US and 2 UK universities, has served on committees of International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Society for Conservation Biology, World Health Organization, National Academy of Sciences, Department of Interior and advised a range of government, commercial and non-commercial organizations including NASA, major pharmaceutical companies and others. He has published papers in Science , Lancet and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . He is a winner of the 2000 CSIRO medal for collaborative research, and his work has been the focus of extensive media coverage. more...