Faces of Penn State: Peter Hudson
Willaman Professor of Biology

“As an undergraduate, I did all I could to avoid studying parasites,” said Peter Hudson, Willaman Professor of Biology, laughing. “I did not want to spend the rest of my life looking into the droppings of other animals… and that’s precisely what my students and I have been doing for the past 25 years.” Hudson, one of the first scientists to study parasites and their effect on wild animal populations, came to Penn State in 2002 and quickly founded the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics (CIDD) with support from the Penn State Institutes of the Environment, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the Eberly College of Science, and the College of Agricultural Sciences.

A native of Scotland, his work now extends from Penn State to his homeland to Africa, where human tuberculosis is showing up in the mongoose population. In a region where 60 percent of the people are HIV positive, and a good portion of those have TB, it seems that coughing workers who host safari-goers are transmitting the disease to the animals. “If I had unlimited funds, I’d spend most of my time in Africa. The day-to-day struggle of life is so obvious that anything you can do there can have huge impacts,” said Hudson.

“I wish there were more hours in the day to learn the new techniques that would allow us to answer the biological questions and develop a full understanding.”

A full understanding of State College after a lifetime in Scotland presents its own challenges to Hudson and his family. “There is no doubt that I miss what I consider to be real mountains,” he said. “But what I love about Pennsylvania is the expansive countryside and these rolling wooded hills, knowing that around any corner you can come across a bear.” The transition has been surprisingly smoother than he anticipated. “The friends we’ve made since having come to State College are some of the most charming people we’ve ever met,” he said, “and everybody at Penn State is just so positive working together. This ethos just doesn’t exist in other places. I have yet to hear someone say a negative thing about Penn State. I find that personally empowering.”

The Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics provides an interdisciplinary approach that draws scientists from mathematics, biology, immunology, and even architecture, to study, for instance, how the environment affects the spread of disease in chicken houses. Hudson recognized the need for such an approach when he was advising his government on how to tackle the 2001 hoof-and-mouth epidemic in the United Kingdom. “We knew so much about different aspects but we couldn’t link those aspects together because there were critical pieces of information missing,” he said. “If people had worked together, we could have identified those pieces. My hope is that our work in the center can help to put a brick in the wall of understanding that will relieve some suffering for human and wildlife.”

Suzan Erem