Who we are

Peter Daszak

Editor-in-chief, EcoHealth
EcoHealth Alliance, New York, NY, USA

Dr Peter Daszak is President of EcoHealth Alliance (formerly Wildlife Trust), a US-based organization which conducts research and field programs on global health and conservation. At Wildlife Trust, Dr Daszak manages a headquarters staff of 35 and a global staff of over 700 which conducts research and manages initiatives to prevent emerging pandemics and conserve wildlife biodiversity. This includes research on zoonoses that spill over from wildlife in emerging disease 'hotspots', including influenza, Nipah virus, SARS, West Nile virus and others. Dr Daszak's work includes identifying the first case of a species extinction due to disease, the discovery of chytridiomycosis, the major cause of global amphibian declines, publishing the first paper to highlight emerging diseases of wildlife, coining the term 'pathogen pollution', discovery of the bat origin of SARS-like coronaviruses, identifying the drivers of Nipah and Hendra virus emergence, and producing the first ever emerging disease 'hotspots' map.

Dr Daszak is a member of the Council of Advisors of the One Health Commission, Treasurer of DIVERSITAS (ICSU), past member of the International Standing Advisory Board of the Australian Biosecurity CRC, past member of the the IOM Committee on global surveillance for emerging zoonoses and the NRC committee on the future of veterinary research. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Ecohealth, past Treasurer, and a founding director of the International Ecohealth Association. In 2000, he won the CSIRO medal for collaborative research in the discovery of amphibian chytridiomycosis. He has published over 130 scientific papers and book chapters, including papers in Science, Nature, PNAS, The Lancet, PLoS Biology and other leading journals. His work has been the focus of articles in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Washington Post, US News & World Report CBS 60 Minutes, CNN, ABC, NPR's Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition & Fresh Air with Terri Gross. He is a former guest worker at the CDC where he assisted in the pathology activity during the 1999 Nipah virus outbreak. His work is funded by the John E. Fogarty International Center of NIH, NIAID, NSF, USAID, Google.org, Rockefeller and other foundations. To date, his group is one of the few to have been awarded three prestigious NIH/NSF 'Ecology of Infectious Disease' awards, and is one of four partners to share a recent multi-million dollar award from USAID ("PREDICT") with the goal of predicting and preventing the next emerging zoonotic disease. more...