Chris Gilligan
Professor Chris Gilligan holds a personal chair in Mathematical Biology in the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge, where he leads the Epidemiology and Modelling Group. His research is focused on the development and use of models to predict the spread of plant disease and to identify optimal strategies for the control of disease at scales ranging from on-farm to the landscape, regional and continental. Current applications involve models to inform the control of crop disease in the UK, US, Africa and India, as well as diseases of trees in natural vegetation in the US and UK. His research group is contracted by the UK Government to provide emergency modelling support to respond to emerging epidemics of plant disease. Professor Gilligan also works at the interface between epidemiology and economics and on longer-term models to predict future demands for energy, land and water. He has published > 200 papers and reviews.
Professor Gilligan has served as Head (Dean) of Biological Sciences, one of six academic schools at Cambridge. He currently chairs the UK Joint Nature Conservation Committee (the public body that advises the UK Government and Devolved Administrations on UK-wide and international nature conservation). He also holds a Prime Ministerial appointment as Trustee of the Natural History Museum in London. He chaired the recent UK Government Taskforce on Tree Heath and Plant Biosecurity; he was chair of the Science Advisory Council for the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) (2011-14) and served two terms as a member of the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (2003-2009). He has chaired a number of other national reviews including UK research in crop science and animal health.
In addition to an MA and DPhil from Oxford, Professor Gilligan holds an ScD degree from Cambridge. He has held a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship and a UK National Research Council Professorial Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Professorial Fellow of King’s College Cambridge and a past President of the British Society for Plant Pathology. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours (2015) for services to plant heath in the field of epidemiology.
Abstracts this author is presenting: