School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine

Congratulations to Professor Daniel Streicker who has been awarded the Fleming Award 2024 as part of the Microbiology Society Awards 2024.

The Microbiology Society has announced the winners of the 2024 Prizes, which will be awarded at their Annual Conference 2024 in Edinburgh from 8-11 April, where the winners will present their Prize Lectures.

The Microbiology Society’s Prizes recognise excellence and are awarded to those making significant contributions in the field of microbiology, based on nominations received from the membership. Winners are selected for their work to advance understanding of microbiology and champion the contribution made by microbiology, our members and their work in addressing global challenges.

Fleming Prize 2024: Professor Daniel Streicker

Professor Daniel Streicker is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Viral Ecology at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, UK and the School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Glasgow, UK.

He uses a wide variety of approaches - from field studies of wild bats, to genomics, to machine learning – to develop the fundamental understanding, computational tools and biologicals needed to prevent virus transmission between species.

Professor Streicker began his career at the University of Virginia, US, studying patterns of gastro-intestinal parasite transmission among wild rodent species in the mountains of Virginia. He continued his training as an Emerging Infectious Diseases Fellow at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he used bat rabies viruses as a model to develop methods to quantify cross-species transmission from virus sequence data. He earned his PhD from the University of Georgia, US in 2011, identifying the ecological and evolutionary barriers that prevent rabies from establishing in new host species. During his PhD, Professor Streicker also initiated a longitudinal field study on wild vampire bats in Peru, which has remained active for the past 17 years. His work on this system revealed that current policies in Latin America that cull bats for rabies control can be counterproductive and showed the potential for spatiotemporal forecasting to facilitate proactive rather than reactive human and animal vaccination. His team is now exploring how recombinant, self-disseminating vaccines might interrupt the transmission of zoonosis within bat populations. Since moving to the UK in 2013, Professor Streicker has been supported by a Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship (2014) and a Wellcome Senior Research Fellowship (2019). His work has expanded to find creative ways to use increasingly available genomic data to inform strategies to prevent the emergence of wildlife-origin diseases; for example, developing machine learning algorithms that use genomic data to prioritize high-risk viruses at the time of their discovery and to identify the animal origins and potential future hosts of RNA viruses.

In addition to the Fleming prize, Professor Streicker’s discoveries have been recognized with the 2013 Science and SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists, the 2014 Wellcome-Beit Prize, and the 2020 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Biological Sciences. He was selected as TEDMed speaker in 2018 and became a National Geographic Explorer in 2015.

Commenting on receiving the Fleming Prize 2024, Professor Streicker said:  

“I am absolutely thrilled to have been selected for the 2024 Fleming Prize! The successes so far in my career have been a product of many people’s efforts in many countries, from field assistants in Latin America, to students and postdocs in the US and the UK, to mentors and collaborators in academia and beyond. It is these diverse interactions, each brining distinct perspectives and expertise, which make science creative and fun, allowing myself and my team to thrive personally and scientifically. It is inspiring and exciting that the Microbiology Society has decided to recognize our science, which, siting at the interface of ecology, epidemiology, evolution, and virology, often feels on the fringe of any single field. I am delighted to have the opportunity to bring my perspectives to this year’s conference and draw attention to the challenges and opportunities we face in trying to curb the spread of pathogens between species.”

The Fleming Prize is named after Sir Alexander Fleming, founder and first President (1945–1947) of the Microbiology Society, then named the Society for General Microbiology, and is awarded to an early career researcher who has achieved an outstanding research record. The recipient is awarded £1,000.

---

First published: 7 November 2023