Dr. Amr Aswad is an evolutionary biologist and St. Hilda’s College Junior Research Fellow. He is currently based in the Zoology Department at the University of Oxford where he also obtained his doctorate in 2015. Before that, He graduated from King’s College London and Imperial College London.   Amr’s research focuses on the long term evolution of viruses, in an emerging field of study known as Paleovirology. Thanks to recent technological advances in DNA sequencing technology, we have accumulated vast quantities of data that allow us to study biological diversity in unprecedented detail. By reconstructing the evolutionary history of viruses and their hosts, we can learn about the long-term dynamics of infection and immunity.    Amr is interested in the potential for this kind of big data to aid in viral discovery. His latest work involves the discovery of a new group of herpesvirus-like sequences in fish. This study demonstrated how we can use genomics and  evolutionary biology to identify new viruses that may before disease outbreaks. This approach has applications in medicine and epidemiology, but also in the study of vertrinary diseases that effect agricultural production and therfore global food security.