Branco Weiss Fellowship: Dr Pedro Vale
Dr Pedro Vale has been made a Branco Weiss Fellow by Society in Science at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Dr Vale is an evolutionary biologist and research fellow at the Centre for Immunity, Infection & Evolution in the School of Biological Sciences.
He completed his PhD at the University in 2009 then took a postdoctoral position at France’s largest ecology research institute - Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionelle & Evolutive (CEFE), Montpelier.
Dr Vale returned to the University of Edinburgh in 2013.
He was appointed a Branco Weiss Fellow following a global recruitment campaign by Society in Science. Up to 10 fellowships are awarded each year.
The prestigious awards comprise a generous personal grant, which gives recipients up to five years of complete academic freedom to pursue their own interdisciplinary research.
Dr Vale’s research will look at the long-term consequences of disease control methods such as anti-virulence drugs. He will investigate genetic and environmental causes of individual variation on host health during infection and its potential consequences for disease spread and pathogen evolution. Swiss entrepreneur Dr Branco Weiss founded Society in Science - The Branco Weiss Fellowship in 2002. It offers researchers who demonstrate outstanding scientific achievement an opportunity to extend their work to specific social and cultural questions and perspectives.