Dr Kevin Tyler

Biography

Protozoan parasites cause many of the world’s worst diseases and are amongst the greatest sources of suffering and death in humans and livestock. Compared with bacterial and viral infections, researching the biology of these organisms with a view to deriving effective drugs, vaccines and diagnostics has been long neglected.

I have focused on this group of organisms for many years and my research investigates interaction between these organisms and their hosts, and whether elucidating and disrupting these interactions can provide novel therapies. I take a genomics led approach to tackling problems associated with a variety of parasite, vector born and enteric diseases and collaborates in a variety of networks worldwide from Europe to South America, to Africa and the Middle East.

My most recent research has been focused at achieving an understanding of pathogen virulence, using the enteric parasite cryptosproidium as a model to consider how and why new virulent lineages emerge, how they can be diagnosed and managed most effectively. I have been an open access and open research pioneer, founder of several journals, former general secretary of the British Society for Parasitology and am currently editor in Chief of the mostly highly ranked pathogen microbiology Journal, Virulence.