Our people

An international team – from Brisbane to San Francisco Bay

The research brings together a multi-disciplinary team of international biologists, entomologists, field officers and communicators, working to provide a collaborative approach to tackling mosquito-borne viruses.

Meet the lead scientists…

Dr Nigel Beebe

CSIRO and The University of Queensland

Nigel Beebe is CSIRO’s Lead Scientist on the Innisfail mosquito research project and an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland.

Nigel’s work integrates entomological procedures with molecular evolution and genetics tools to answer fundamental questions including exploirng what mosquito species transmit disease pathogens, where they exist, why they are there, as well as how mosquito populations connect and move.

Nigel’s research areas also include studying malaria vectors in the Southwest Pacific, endemic and exotic arbovirus vectors, and more recently developing and delivering mosquito control strategies based around using the male mosquito as a population suppression tool.

UQ: http://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/1434
Lab: http://www.nigelbeebe.com/

Prof Scott Ritchie

James Cook University

Scott Ritchie leads a diverse group of health practitioners and research scientists at James Cook University whose collective goal is to prevent vector-borne disease, especially dengue, in north Queensland.

Scott led the Queensland Health dengue control program from 1994-2011 and is currently employed as a NHMRC Professorial Research Fellow at James Cook University. His research has centred upon control of vector-borne diseases, especially dengue.

Scott is involved in applications of the bacteria Wolbachia to control dengue, the potential impact of global warming on dengue, and testing of new pesticides for the control of Aedes aegypti. The search for improved traps for mosquitoes and the pathogens they spread has also been an obsession.

Dr Nigel Snoad

Verily

Nigel Snoad joined Verily’s Debug Project in 2015 as Product Manager. He is based in San Francisco, California where he is working on technology to help combat mosquito borne disease. Prior to Verily, Nigel led Google’s Crisis Response and Elections products and spent a decade leading humanitarian programs at Microsoft and the United Nations, responding to crises in countries that included Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Sudan and Indonesia.

Nigel has a PhD in complex adaptive systems and systems engineering from the Australian National University, held research fellowships at the Santa Fe Institute and Stanford University, and taught Humanitarian Design at the Parsons School for Design. Before being side-tracked Nigel started his scientific career as a soil microbiologist at CSIRO.