Professor Andrew Cunningham is a veterinarian who has worked at the Zoological Society of London since 1988, initially as veterinary pathologist and latterly as Deputy Director of Science. Andrew’s research includes investigating infectious and non-infectious disease threats to wildlife conservation, including the drivers of disease emergence and zoonotic spill-over.
Andrew discovered a new epidemic ranaviral disease of amphibians in Europe and he published the first definitive report of the global extinction of a species by an infectious disease. He has led several international and multi-disciplinary wildlife disease research projects, including the investigation of vulture declines in South Asia and the international team that discovered the chytrid fungus that is currently causing global amphibian population declines and extinctions, for which he was awarded a medal by the CSIRO in Australia.
In 2010, he won a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award for his work on zoonotic viruses in African bats and in 2016 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. He was a first term member of the Quadripartite’s One Health High Level Expert Panel, and a member of the WHO/Europe One Health Technical Advisory Group. He currently sits on Defra’s Wildlife Disease Core Group and on the British government’s One Health Vector Borne Disease surveillance group.