Mark's areas of expertise include preventive veterinary medicine, epidemiology and control of infectious diseases of ruminant livestock, and veterinary public health, both in the UK and internationally, focussing particularly but not exclusively on vector-borne and parasitic disease.

He has conducted research in the field of international animal health, including zoonotic diseases, and held a number of large collaborative grant awards. His main research interests are diagnosis, epidemiology and control of diseases of farmed livestock of economic importance. Three major research themes have included control of neglected zoonotic diseases, integrated control of vector-borne diseases and trypanocidal drug resistance. Earlier research focused on the epidemiology and control of major vector-borne protozoan diseases of livestock, including tropical parasites such as trypanosomiasis and tick-borne diseases.

He is a Board Member and Co-Director of the Food Security and Land Research Alliance among the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter and Rothamsted Research. A particularly important focus for the activity of the Alliance is the Rothamsted Research - North Wyke Farm Platform in Devon, a state of the art research facility for farm scale research on biophysical processes that influence agriculture and the environment, and a key node in the Global Farm Platform network.

Mark also leads the Food Security theme within the Cabot Institute.  An major new initiative within this theme is the development of the Global Farm Platform for sustainable ruminant production, which is an international network supported by the Worldwide Universities Network and the Global Innovations Initiative. The Global Farm Platform was created to promote understanding of the role of grazing ruminant livestock production as a key component of global food security in a world challenged by population growth, climate change and ecosystem degradation. The ethos of this work is set out in the position paper 'Steps to Sustainable Livestock' and correspondence 'Intensive farming: When less means more on dairy farms' published recently in Nature.    

Interfaces between One Health and Food Security research within and beyond the University of Bristol are shown diagrammatically below. 

Recent publications

Further information about Professor Mark Eisler can be found here.