Policy Spotlight: Maximising microbiologists’ impact in policymaking

Professor David Oliver

Professor of Catchment Science, University of Stirling

Professor David Oliver’s research addresses the growing demand for catchment resources from a wide range of stakeholders with often competing or conflicting agendas. He focuses on the effective management of pressures on land and water environments worldwide to safeguard environmental quality and public health while supporting recreation, food production, energy generation and other essential ecosystem services that catchments provide.

His research integrates environmental risks and socio-ecological processes across catchment systems from source to sea. He collaborates with both social and natural scientists, as well as end-user and policy communities, using interdisciplinary research approaches that span many fields. His primary research interests include:

• Fate and transfer dynamics of diffuse pollutants (such as nutrients, faecal indicators, pathogens, and emerging contaminants) across multiple scales;
• Managing competing demands on soil and water resources in catchments to benefit public health;
• Evidence-based policy for safer, healthier and more resilient bathing water environments;
• Health and wellbeing benefits of green and blue space, with a particular focus on the blue-health benefits of freshwater environments;
• Public perception of environmental risks to human health;
• Co-design of models and decision support systems with end-users to visualise risks to water quality at farm-to-landscape scales.

Paul-Enguerrand Fady

Biosecurity Policy Manager, Centre for Long Term Resilience (CLTR)

In his role as Biosecurity Policy Manager at CLTR, Paul-Enguerrand leads an extensive portfolio of workstreams in our Biosecurity Policy Unit spanning immediate, near-term, and long-term priorities in supply chain resilience for medical countermeasures, nucleic acid synthesis screening, and mirror life.

Paul-Enguerrand brings to this role several years of experience working in Parliament, covering policy areas across science, health, agriculture, environment, and innovation. His Parliamentary work has focused on advising senior policymakers on One Health, infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and the microbiome. He was previously Policy Research Lead for the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, where he led global projects on antibiotic supply chains and antimicrobial stewardship.

He undertook his doctoral research in Pharmaceutical Science as part of the London Interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme, supervised by Prof. James Mason at King’s College London as well as Prof. Mark Sutton and Dr Lucy Bock at the United Kingdom Health Security Agency. His thesis focused on AMR.

Prior to his PhD, Paul-Enguerrand obtained B.Sc. in Microbiology and Immunology (with a minor in Linguistics) from McGill University.

Professor Nicola Spence

The UK Chief Health Plant Officer, Defra

Nicola is the UK Chief Plant Health Officer at Defra and advises ministers, industry and others about the risks posed by plant pests and diseases, ensuring that measures are in place to manage those risks and minimise their impact, as well as leading the operational response in the event of a disease outbreak.

Nicola is an expert in plant health and international plant trade and previously researched virus diseases of horticultural crops in the UK and internationally for over 20 years. She is a former President of the British Society for Plant Pathology, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, Honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham, and a Trustee of The Royal Horticultural Society and The Yorkshire Arboretum. She was awarded a CBE for services to plant health in 2022.

She has a BSc in Botany from the University of Durham, an MSc in Microbiology from Birkbeck College, University of London and a PhD in Plant Virology from the University of Birmingham. The subject of her PhD was Bean Common Mosaic Virus in Phaseolus beans in Africa.