Dr. Poinar’s current interests lie at the interstitial spaces of research streams which integrate history, evolutionary genetics, biochemistry and mathematical modelling into a more consilient approach to disease origins and the tempo and mode of disease dynamics.

Dr. Poinar is interested in understanding how pathogens emerge and evolve in new hosts as this is central to their control. A pressing question currently bothering him is how a new pathogen will evolve if it cannot be immediately eradicated? Will it evolve to become more or less harmful? To understand this fundamental evolutionary process, he likes to track pathogen evolution in ‘real time’ and in a natural setting. This is difficult to achieve in the case of most bacteria because their evolutionary rates are so low that changes in virulence cannot be measured over the few years that humans can generally carry out experiments. Critically, ‘ancient DNA’ provides this essential time-series information and in doing so can transform our understanding of microbial pathogenesis. We will develop novel molecular and bioinformatic tools which will take advantage of challenging data from an exceptionally novel set of experiments in which temporally sampled bacterial genomes from past epidemics (and modern clinical settings) are reconstructed and used to measure natural selection, attenuation and virulence.