Our project is a collaboration between socioeconomists, epidemiologists and specialists in immunology and disease pathology and is being jointly run by the Central Institute of Brackishwater Aquaculture (CIBA) in India and the University of Southampton in the UK.
The project is being led from the UK by Dr Chris Hauton (University of Southampton; http://www.southampton.ac.uk/), from India by Dr M.S. Shekhar (Central Institute of Brackishwater Aquaculture; http://www.ciba.res.in/), and from Bangladesh by Prof M.A. Salam (Bangladesh Agricultural University; http://www.bau.edu.bd/).
Socioeconomists:
Dr Sergei Shubin, Swansea University
http://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/science/geography/s.v.shubin/
http://www.swansea.ac.uk/cmpr/pacondaa/
Dr Sergei Shubin (SVS) at Swansea University (SU) is a social scientist with interests in poverty and inequality. His current research interests include:
Geographies of inequality: poverty and social exclusion
Moving geographies: mobilities and migrations
Geographies of care, relation and community
Sergei Shubin is working with Dr Tanjil Sowgat (University of Swansea) and Dr Heather Dickey (University of Aberdeen) to understand perceptions of poverty amongst farmers in India and Bangladesh and to quantify the socioeconomic impacts of aquaculture disease outbreaks in both countries
Dr Heather Dickey, University of Aberdeen
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/business/profiles/h.dickey
Heather’s main research interests are in the fields of applied labour economics, regional economics, and micro-econometrics. In particular, her research has focused on regional wage inequality, wage equation models, occupational and geographical mobility, job satisfaction, and multiple job holding. She has published in a range of journals including the Journal of Regional Science, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Environment and Planning A, Regional Studies, LABOUR: Review of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations, and the Journal of Rural Studies.
Fishery Biologists:
Prof Dr. Md. Abdus Salam and Prof. Dr M. Mahfujul Haque (MMH), Bangladesh Agricultural University
http://www.bau.edu.bd/pages/faculty_list/AQ
Immunologists and disease pathologists:
Drs Shekhar, Gopikrishna, Vinaya Kumar and Sateesh Kumar
Drs Sood, Pradhan, and Mohindra, National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources, India
Dr A.S. Sahul Hameed, C Abdul Hakeem College, India
Dr.A.S.Sahul Hameed has been doing research on diseases of economically important aquatic animals such as shrimp, prawn and fish since 1990. White spot syndrome virus (WSSV) was isolated for the first time in India by his team PI and developed immunological based diagnostic method (Sahul Hameed et al., 1998). He has published evidence for resistance to WSSV in the freshwater prawn Macrobrachium rosenbergii (Sahul Hameed et al., 2000) and in crabs in India (Sahul Hameed AS et al., 2003). His research includes work on DNA vaccines for WSSV (Rajesh Kumar et al., 2008) and nanoparticle oral delivery methods for vaccines (Rajesh Kumar et al., 2009). The occurrence of Macrobrachium rosenbergii nodavirus (MrNV) and XSV was reported in prawn for the first time in India by him (Sahul Hameed et al., 2004). Because of his extensive work on these viruses, the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), Paris has designated his as an OIE Reference Laboratory and him as an OIE Expert. He has also initiated the research work on development of fish cell lines and he has developed India’s first marine fish cell line from Asian sea bass (Sahul Hameed et al., 2006). Till date, he has developed more than 28 cell lines from marine, brackishwater and freshwater fish. Transferred two products to aquaculture based company (Poseidon Biotech, Chennai, India) for commercialization (Dr.Sahul’s PCR kit for shrimp viruses and Herbal Immunostimulant – Immuzone for shrimp immunity).
Dr Chris Hauton, Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton
Email: ch10(at)noc.soton.ac.uk
Chris’ research interests include all aspects of marine invertebrate ecophysiology and immunology, essentially how natural and anthropogenic environmental drivers impact organism biology and host pathogen interactions. His research encompasses all levels of biological organization from molecular studies of gene expression to assays of whole organism physiology. In 2008 he worked with the Malaysian ABT, providing training in ‘Shrimp Health and Immunobiology’ for fishery officers and shrimp farmers and in 2011 he was an invited speaker at an OECD workshop on ‘Diseases of Beneficial Invertebrates’ in Canada. Recently Chris’ team have advocated minimum reporting guidelines (MISA) for reporting of meta data in immune performance and infection studies within aquatic invertebrates (Hauton et al. 2015 Dev. Comp. Immunol. 48: 360-368).
Chris is working with Luca Peruzza (University of Southampton, email: lp6c17(at)soton.ac.uk) to understand the molecular mechanisms of host-pathogen interaction in WSSV disease. 
Luca Peruzza is responsible of the bioinformatics analysis to determine changes in the transcriptome (the set of all RNA molecules in one population of cells) of the host following infection with WSSV, with a particular emphasis on micro-RNA (small RNA molecules of about 20-22 nucleotides involved in transcriptional regulation of gene expression).
Dr Valerie Smith, Scottish Oceans Institute, University of St Andrews
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=TzKUHJwAAAAJ&hl=en
Email: vjs1(at)st-andrews.ac.uk
Val Smith is a Reader at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, specialising in the immunology and microbiology of marine and aquatic animals, especially decapod crustaceans and finfish. After gaining her PhD in 1978, she then took up a Lectureship in Marine Microbiology for London University from 1979-1988. As she was based at the University Marine Biological Station, Millport, Scotland, where she also held an Honorary Lectureship in microbiology for Glasgow University. She moved to St Andrews in 1989 and extended her research interests to innate immunity of fish, antibacterial peptides and the antibacterial activity of fatty acids from single celled eukaryotes. She has been awarded numerous Visiting Professorships, including a Burroughs Wellcome Award for education on marine microbiology (1997) and a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Senior Visiting Professorship in 2009. She serves on the Editorial Board for Developmental and Comparative Immunology and Fish and Shellfish Immunology (both Elsevier journals) and served as President of the International Society for Developmental and Comparative Immunology from 2006-2015. She has held several BBSRC and NERC grants during her career and is currently Lead PI on an aquaculture related BBSRC-funded research project on salmon immunity as well as coPI on two other BBSRC-Newton Fund International Consortium grants.
Professor Van West, Aberdeen Oomycete Laboratory, University of Aberdeen
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/ims/research/microbiology/oomycete/
Prof. Dr. Ir. Pieter van West is a past Royal Society University Research Fellow. He is the Director of the International Centre for Aquaculture Research and Development (ICARD) at the University of Aberdeen. He is also the Microbiology Programme lead in the Institute of Medical Sciences at the University of Aberdeen.
His current research programme focuses on oomycete biology. Several economically and environmentally important oomycetes, or watermoulds, are studied at most disciplinary levels (taxonomy, ecology, epidemiology, biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology and especially host-microbe interactions).
The animal pathogenic oomycetes under investigation are Saprolegnia parasitica, Saprolegnia australis, Saprolegnia diclina, Aphanomyces spp. and Halioticida spp.
The plant pathogenic species include mainly Phytophthora infestans and several Pythium spp.and the algal pathogenic species include Eurychasma dicksonii, Olpidiopsis spp., Anisolpidium spp. and Maulinia spp.
Pieter is working with Dr. Franziska Trusch (University of Aberdeen) http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sfirc/people/profiles/franziska.trusch/ to understand the mechanism of host parasite interactions in EUS of major carps.
Dr Trusch is research fellow in the lab of Pieter van West (Aberdeen, UK) and interested in host-pathogen interactions on protein level. In my doctoral degree I acquired a comprehensive knowledge of the physico-chemical characterisation of proteins that I am now applying to effector proteins secreted by pathogens during infection of their host.
Epidemiologists:
Professor Kenton Morgan at Liverpool University (LU)
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/ageing-and-chronic-disease/staff/kenton-morgan/
Born in Newport, South Wales, brought up in Ferryside, educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar, Carmarthen and Trinity College, Cambridge, Kenton graduated in Biochemistry (1971) and Veterinary Science in (1974). He joined the mucosal immunology group at Bristol Veterinary School in 1975, completing a PhD in 1979. He was visiting scientist at the veterinary school Hanover before taking a three-year career break, cycling, with his partner, through Europe, Africa and South East Asia.
He returned to the UK in 1983 and after a temporary job as Veterinary Investigation Officer with MAFF at Reading, was appointed to a Lectureship at Bristol where he developed research groups in epidemiology and immunology, taught preventive medicine and provided a clinical consultancy in small ruminant health. He became Reader in Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Head of the Division of Animal Health and Husbandry was Postgraduate Dean and Overseas advisor from 1987-1996. In 1996, he was appointed to the Chair in Epidemiology at Liverpool, the first at a UK veterinary school.
He is past president of AVTRW, SVEPM, ISAAE, BCVS and ex bass guitarist with the “Clips” “Langford Stranglers” and “Epidemic”. He has broad interests in animal and human health and his 180 publications, 30 successful postgraduate students reflect that.
Poverty Alleviation through CONtrol of Disease in Asian Aquaculture (PACONDAA) 