Benjamin ROCHE

Benjamin Roche is a Research Director at the French National Institute for sustainable Development (IRD), where he is the “One Health” scientific advisor of the CEO, as well as an associate professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

His research is focusing on understanding what key inter-disciplinary insights can be gleaned from bringing together the fields of evolutionary ecology and public health. To do so, he has studied how host and pathogen diversity may affect infectious disease transmission and may lead to zoonotic diseases emergence. He has also worked to understand the interactions between ecological and societal processes in pathogen propagation. While deeply rooted in fundamental research, these projects also offer translational opportunities that are investigated to improve public health strategies, especially against vector-borne diseases in European and low-income countries. The unifying goal for all these research projects is to gain a better understanding of, and ideally find ways to help improve, public health strategies, especially in low-income countries.

He has authored more than 100 articles in international journals (The Lancet, Ecology Letters, PLoS Biology, PNAS, PLoS Pathogens, Trends in Parasitology, eLife, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society among others), edited 3 books and has been invited more than 40 times to give communications in national and international conferences.