Grenfell Elected Fellow of British Royal Society

3 February 2005 — Bryan Grenfell, the Alumni Professor of Biology at Penn State, has been elected a Fellow of the British Royal Society. Founded in 1660, the Royal Society is an independent organization that serves as the United Kingdom's academy of science by advising the British government and promoting the natural and applied sciences both nationally and internationally. Election to the fellowship of the Royal Society is recognized worldwide as a sign of the highest regard in science. New Fellows must be proposed by two existing Fellows and then assessed by selection committees in each major field of science.

Grenfell studies the dynamics of the spatial and temporal interaction of infectious diseases, particularly as related to the control of disease in human and animal populations. He combines the development of theory with pioneering analyses of empirical data sets from a range of systems to demonstrate how density dependence and randomness, or disorder, interact to drive population dynamics in space and time. He is particularly interested in the population biology and control of foot-and-mouth disease and childhood infections such as measles. He also studies the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens such as influenza at different spatial scales.

His research accomplishments have been recognized with the T.H. Huxley Medal from the Imperial College in the United Kingdom in 1991, the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 1995, and an Order of the British Empire award in 2002. He also received a Professorial Fellow Award from the United Kingdom Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council in 2003.

From 2001 to 2002 Grenfell was a member of the Chief Scientific Advisor’s Science Group on the control of the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in the United Kingdom. He has served on United Kingdom Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant committees for Terrestrial Life Sciences from 1996 to 1999, and for Special Topics on Wildlife Diseases in 1991 and 1992. He served on the Infection and Immunity advisory panel from 1992 to 1995 and on the Biomathematics advisory panel from 1991 to 1996, both with the Wellcome Trust.

Grenfell has published 140 scientific papers about his research. He has been a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of Theoretical Biology from 2000 to 2003, and a member of the editorial board for the British Ecological Society Journal of Animal Ecology from 1993 to 2001. He was associate editor of American Naturalist from 1997 to 2000, was on the editorial council of the British Society for Parasitology from 1992 to 1994, and was the editor of a special issue of Parasitology on wildlife diseases in 1995.

He was co-organizer of a Royal Society discussion meeting on Chaos and Forecasting in 1994. In 1993 he was co-organizer of the Programme on Epidemic Models and organizer of a meeting on the Ecology of Infectious Diseases in Natural Populations, both at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Prior to joining Penn State in September 2004, Grenfell was in the United Kingdom at the University of Cambridge as professor of population biology from 2002 to 2004 and as a member of the faculty of the Department of Zoology from 1990 to 2002. He was a lecturer in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield from 1986 to 1990. He also was a research fellow in pure and applied biology at the Imperial College in London from 1981 to 1986, and was a research assistant in biology at the University of York from 1977 to 1981.

Grenfell received his bachelor’s degree with honors in zoology from the Imperial College of London in 1976. He received both his master’s degree in biological computation and his doctoral degree in biology in 1977 and 1980 respectively, from the University of York in the United Kingdom.

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