One Health for One Environment: an A-Z Approach for Tackling Zoonoses

This grant funds doctoral training partnerships, not a single research project—it will train a cohort of PhD students to tackle diseases that jump from animals to humans. Zoonotic diseases—like bird flu, rabies, and Lyme disease—account for most emerging infectious threats. Current approaches often work in silos: vets study the animal side, medics the human side, ecologists the environment. This training programme aims to break down those barriers by producing researchers who can work across all three domains from the start. If successful, the programme will create a pipeline of scientists equipped to spot outbreaks earlier, understand how land use and climate change drive spillover events, and design interventions that protect both human and animal health. The "One Health" approach recognises that human health is inseparable from the health of animals and the environments they share. Because this is a training grant, its primary impact will be on the next generation of researchers rather than on immediate discoveries. But similar interdisciplinary training programmes have historically produced the scientists who later developed pandemic surveillance systems, vaccine delivery strategies, and wildlife disease monitoring networks that quietly protect public health every day.