Stefanie M Schäfer

Stephanie's interest and expertise lies in the biology and ecology of arthropod vectors and the pathogens they transmit.

She is part of an Indo-UK One Health research collaboration focused on the tick-transmitted haemorrhagic Kyasanur Forest Disease. This zoononis affects low-income communities in the Western Ghats forests in southwest India. The project takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand both ecological and social risk factors for zoonotic diseases risk and will co-produce decision support tools and guidance for the public health, animal health and forestry sectors to help communities avoid exposure to the Kyasanur Forest Disease virus.

Before this, she was involved in research projects on biting midges (Culicoides) aimed at better understanding how midge-borne disease are transmitted and spread amongst livestock herds in the UK. Stephanie has worked on the ecology of mosquitoes and the population structure, phylogeny and evolution of various parasites, tick-borne bacterial and viral pathogens.

Stephanie is part of the Environmental Change Network (ECN), a long-term monitoring project set up in the 1990s to help detect and understand environmental change and its ecological impacts. At Wytham, the recent arrival of Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, a fungal disease that is expected to cause large-scale dieback of the forest's European ash stands, has led to an interdisciplinary collaboration with Oxford University and University College London that aims to track the shifting ecosystem ecology under natural progression of the pathogen-induced mass tree mortality.