Graham Hickling
NIMBioS Associate Director for Partner Relations
Active: October 2008 - December 2012
Emeritus: January 2013 - present
Graham Hickling is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries in the University of Tennessee's Institute of Agriculture, and Director of the Institute's Center for Wildlife Health.
He received his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Western Ontario. From 1981 to 1992 he worked as a research scientist for the New Zealand (NZ) Government's Landcare Research Institute, where he managed a multidisciplinary program focusing on wildlife reservoirs of disease. In 1992 Dr. Hickling joined the staff at Lincoln University in NZ, and in 2002 was appointed Associate Professor at Michigan State University, where he developed a graduate specialization program in wildlife disease ecology and management. In November 2005 he joined UT. He is a member of the Wildlife Disease Working Group of the Wildlife Society and was Vice President of the New Zealand Ecological Society. Dr. Hickling served as a key facilitator in making available to the Center the expertise and capabilities in the agricultural units of the University as appropriate to develop Center responses to disease and outbreak/threat issues.
Dr. Hickling is currently developing simulation models of the spatial dynamics of ticks, pathogens, and reservoir host species (mice, raccoons, birds and deer) and their potential for human health risk. These models interface with GIS data to ensure realistic landscape composition and host abundance. Models incorporating wildlife hosts are fundamental to understanding recent distributional changes in ticks and tick-borne pathogens because wildlife dispersal provides the primary means by which ticks invade new habitat. He is also involved in efforts to model the spatial dynamics of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in wild ungulates by adapting to white-tailed deer a spatially-explicit, stochastic model developed for bTB in brushtail possums and cattle in New Zealand.
Reflecting an ongoing interest in wildlife disease surveillance, Dr. Hickling has recently published on the biostatistics of fish pathogen screening to mitigate the likelihood of accidental pathogen introduction during fish translocations.
Email
phone: 865-974-6173
UTK Faculty Page
NIMBioS
1122 Volunteer Blvd., Suite 106
University of Tennessee
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TN 37996-3410
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