Peter Walsh

VaccinApe, USA

Peter Walsh is a field and quantitative ecologist working primarily on apes and other large mammals in Central Africa. His broad research objective is to use a scientific approach to understand the factors that most threaten apes in the wild and, therefore, how apes and other wildlife can be most efficiently conserved. His time is split between basic research on topics such as the dynamics of infectious disease and more applied conservation work on everything from disease control to efficient methods for large mammal survey.

Dr Walsh’s best known work is on the dynamics and population impact of Ebola virus, which has killed roughly one third of the world gorilla population over the last two decades. He first realized that Ebola was a problem while analyzing a large survey dataset from Gabon, where he worked between 1996 and 2000 as a Conservation Ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. In subsequent work as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University and a Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute, he examined the impact of Ebola on ape populations and the dynamics of Ebola transmission as well as Ebola virus phyleogeography and landscape dynamics: particularly the impact of changes in the spatial grain of bushmeat hunting on ape density and Ebola outbreak propensity. He currently coordinates VaccinApe (VaccinApe.org), a consortium of individuals and institutions dedicated to adapting human vaccines as tools for conserving wild apes. They have captive and field trials scheduled for vaccines against both Ebola and measles.

He also studies the disease risk created by habituating gorillas and chimpanzees to human presence for the purpose of research and tourism. Colleagues and him used phylogenetic analyses to confirm the first case of human respiratory pathogen transmission to wild apes and demographic models to show that such transmission was responsible for a large chimpanzee population decline. Dr Walsh is currently conducting similar studies in gorillas. He is also engaged in empirically-based modeling of how spatial memory and other cognitive mechanisms influence the structure of ape contact networks and, consequently, disease dynamics.

He holds a B.A. in History from Middlebury College, M.Sc., M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in Biology from Yale University.