Ian Beveridge Memorial Lecture

Advances in One Health: how have the genes of microbes revealed some of their many secrets?

The era of genomic research has greatly enhanced our abilities to understand microbes. This talk will cover the applications that have been essential to tackle One Health's challenges. Genetic changes in viruses between infections allow us to track their spread through phylogenetic analyses.

Changes in bacterial genomes can reveal their strategies to acquire resistance. And the optimal tool for untargeted detection: metagenomics, which enabled us to identify the range of pathogen species from clinical samples. Plus Q&A.

About the speaker

Dr. Barbara Brito Rodriguez is a Veterinary Research officer at the NSW Department of Primary Industries.

Barbara is a veterinarian from Chile. She joined the Master of Preventive Veterinary Medicine Program followed by a PhD in Epidemiology at UC Davis, USA. Her work mainly focused on disease modelling and molecular epidemiology of Foot-and-Mouth-Disease virus (FMDV) and other diseases of livestock.

As a postdoctoral fellow at the USDA Plum Island Animal disease Center she continued to study FMDV in endemic countries. Barbara also has a broad collaboration network with researchers in South America.

In 2018 Barbara joined the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) as a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow, where she developed new approaches (metatranscriptomic and targeted sequencing) to understand livestock diseases through AusGEM, a UTS collaborative framework with NSW Department of Primary Industry (NSW-DPI). Currently at NSW DPI Elizabeth Macarthur Agricultural Institute, she studies infectious diseases of dairy cattle using metagenomic approaches.

Past lectures

• Watch a video of the 2019 lecture - Professor Ruth Zadoks
• Watch a video of the 2018 lecture - Professor Nigel French
• Watch a video of the 2017 lecture - Professor Michael Lairmore
• Watch a video of the 2016 lecture - Dr Siobhan Mor
• Watch a video of the 2015 lecture - Professor Jonathan Rushton
• Watch a video of the 2014 lecture - Professor Edward Breitschwerdt

About Ian Beveridge

This memorial lecture commemorates the work of Ian Beveridge, whose pioneering work in the area of 'one medicine' foresaw an entirely new kind of interdisciplinary research.

Emeritus Professor William Ian Beveridge was an alumnus of the University of Sydney, graduating in 1931. He began his research career at McMaster Laboratory, CSIR, shortly afterwards supervised by Professor R H Carne.

Remarkably, within a few years he had found the bacterium responsible for footrot of sheep and set the principles for its control and eradication. He was later awarded a DVSc for this research.

During World War II he worked on influenza and other diseases at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. In 1947 he became Professor of Animal Pathology at Cambridge and there and later in the WHO, developed and promoted the concept of 'comparative (one) medicine'.

In 1972 Professor Beveridge published a book, Frontiers in Comparative Medicine, outlining his views in this area of 'one medicine'.