Sam Brown

Research Interests

Why be nice? Why kill your host?

These questions and many more can be organised into a couple of major (and overlapping) areas of research:

• Evolution of cooperation
• Evolution of virulence

These two themes combine strongly when studying the evolutionary ecology of microbial pathogens. Microbes have amazing social lives, often at our expense. Microbial model systems offer unparalleled access to the molecular mechanisms and ecological forces that together shape evolution. To dissect these molecular, ecological and evolutionary interplays, we develop theory in close collaboration with experimentalists.

Brown Lab: Cooperation, Defection, Infection (with publication pdfs)

Additional Information

Graduate student and postdoctoral positions: Enquiries with CV welcome.

Contacts

Websites

• http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/brown/index.htm

Selected Publications

• Brown SP, Le Chat L & Taddei F 2008. Evolution of virulence: invading pathogens trigger host inflammation to exclude competitors. Ecology Letters 11, 44-51.
• Brown SP, Taddei F 2007. The durability of public goods changes the dynamics and nature of social dilemmas. PLoS ONE 2, e593.
• Brown SP, Cornell SJ, Sheppard M, Grant AJ. Maskell DJ, Grenfell BT, Mastroeni P. 2006. Intracellular demography and the dynamics of Salmonella enterica infections. PLoS Biology 4, e349
• Brown SP, Le Chat L, De Paepe M, Taddei F. 2006. Ecology of microbial invasions: amplification allows virus-carriers to invade more rapidly when rare. Current Biology, 16, 2048-2052.
• Brown SP, Hochberg M.E. & Grenfell B.T. 2002. Does multiple infection select for increased virulence? Trends Microbiol. 10, 401-405