Benjamin Roche

Benjamin Roche is a Research Director at the Research Institute for Development (IRD), based in Montpellier. He’s 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. He has also worked to understand the interactions between ecological and societal processes in pathogen propagation. Synergistically, he has also worked on the interactions between infectious diseases transmission and cancerous cells proliferation through the share of a common enemy (our immune system) at an individual scale. Finally, he has tried to understand how cancerogenesis may impact evolution of species life-history traits, and the potential consequences of cancer for the structure of ecological communities. In coming years, he will pursue these efforts by understanding how both host and pathogen diversity, largely studied separately thus far, may interact and the potential impact of such interactions on public health outcomes. He also aims to continue studying the links between infectious diseases and cancer by scaling up our current studies. The unifying goal for all these research projects is to gain a better understanding of, and ideally find ways to help improve, public health situations in low-income countries.