Natural Resources Institute

Staff

Name Details
Dr Judy M. Bettridge
  • Qualifications: BSVc, MSc, PhD, MRCVS
  • Biography:

    Dr Judy Bettridge trained as a veterinary surgeon at the University of Liverpool, where she returned after five years in clinical practice to complete a Masters in Veterinary Infection and Disease Control. This was followed by a PhD in veterinary epidemiology and infection ecology in scavenging chickens in Ethiopia, in collaboration with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). Subsequently, Judy held a postdoctoral research position based out of ILRI Nairobi, Kenya, exploring the effects of poverty and livestock-keeping on zoonotic disease transmission in urban environments. She returned to the UK in 2018 and worked for a period in the civil service as a senior epidemiologist at the Animal and Plant Health Agency, before joining the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich in 2020.

    Judy’s current research covers a variety of topics relating to food safety, food systems and the epidemiology and surveillance of bacterial pathogens.
  • Research / Scholarly Interests:

    Dr. Bettridge’s work is broad, and has spanned a variety of animal and pathogen species combinations. She is interested in systems-thinking approaches, understanding trade-offs, and incorporating multivariate statistics, metrics and qualitative evaluations in user-friendly ways to evaluate complex outcomes.

    Examples include working with the Argentinian dairy sector to explore options for setting up monitoring of antimicrobial usage; and why adopting a single metric that allows international country-level comparisons (mg/PCU) may be less useful to farmers than metrics that break down usage by animal age, drug class and administration route. Although the latter requires more data recording effort, it can help users pinpoint areas for interventions (such as vaccines, hygiene or management changes) that help reduce disease and hence the need for antimicrobial therapies.

    Another example of Judy’s work evaluated how a new method of bacterial typing based on genomics (the SNP address) might be combined with existing surveillance tools for early outbreak detection. The additional resolution of bacterial strains provided by genomic typing methods adds complexity, because of the very large number of strains that can be identified, compared to traditional methods, such as phage-typing. However, it lends itself well to surveillance, especially when combined with a method that identifies expanding spatial clusters.

    Judy has also worked on evaluating the multiple components that go into the design of successful approaches to food safety training in LMICs. This work used a qualitative evaluation framework drawing on behavioural and educational theories to assess approach, audience, context and curricula, and made a number of recommendations to help food safety educators design and evaluate their own programmes.
  • Research Projects:

    “FARMS-SAFE” (Future-proofing Antibacterial resistance Risk Management Surveillance and Stewardship in the Argentinian Farming Environment), led by the University of Bristol and Universidad Nacional De La Plata, Argentina.

    Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global threat to health and development. Argentina, has well-established monitoring of medicine use and resistance withing the human health sector, but no equivalent programmes for the veterinary sector, food or environment. This project has created a surveillance structure to measure use and resistance in the dairy and pig industries and is training researchers who can continue to monitor and evaluate interventions to reduce medicine usage and AMR in the future.

    “RodentGate” is a project led by the University of Antwerp, investigating the role of rodents in and around pig and poultry farms in the EU and UK as reservoirs of livestock diseases, and projecting what may happen under more stringent control of rodenticides. Ecologically-based rodent management allows controls to be precisely targeted, which requires understanding the rodent demography, life history, space use, dispersal capacities, pathogen presence and transmission patterns in the rodent population.

    NRI is leading a workpackage evaluating the presence and diversity of relevant pathogens in wild rodents in and around pig and poultry farms, and has to date detected a variety of bacterial pathogens in rodents, including Leptospira, Brachyspira, Lawsonia and Salmonella,  as well as antibiotic resistant bacterial strains of Enterobacteriaceae.

    The RodentGate project has been extended, in collaboration with APHA, to include a postgraduate research student who is exploring the longitudinal genetic diversity of Salmonella in rodents and pigs on a case study farm and evaluating the implications for genomic typing and surveillance.
  • Teaching Programmes:
    • CDT programme – Introduction to Quantitative Research Methods; Statistics Clinics (with Andrew Mead, Rothamsted Research)
    • ENV-1096 Research Methods for postgraduates module – two lectures on software, data management and introductory statistics
    • ENV-1192 Introduction to Ecological Modelling and Programming. Guest lecture on modelling animal roaming behaviours
  • Greenwich Academic Literature Archive (GALA) link: https://gala.gre.ac.uk/view/authors/7945.html
  • Responsibilities:

    NRI Mid-career Researcher Network Representative (Food and Markets Department)
  • Awards:
    • Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons
    • Member of the British Veterinary Association and the Society for Veterinary Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine
    • Awarded the N.E. Roberts prize: Infection-interactions in Ethiopian village chickens (2014, University of Liverpool Institute of Infection and Global Health)
  • External Profiles:

    ORCID

    https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3917-4660

    LinkedIn

    https://www.linkedin.com/in/bettridge-judy-41776272/

    Google Scholar

    https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=9QO7YSUAAAAJ

    Research Gate

    https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Judy_Bettridge
  • Selected Publications:
Phone: +44 (0)1634 88 3021
Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics for Food and Agriculture
Dr Sophie Bouvaine
  • Qualifications: BSc, MSc, PhD
  • Biography:

    Dr Sophie Bouvaine graduated from the University of York with a PhD, in which she studied the transmission of a major cereal disease by aphids. This project was co-supervised by Neil Boonham from the Food and Environment Research Agency. Dr Bouvaine then undertook a postdoctoral position at Cornell University (USA) with Professor Angela E. Douglas, where she became interested in the physiology of insects pests. She led a research project aimed at understanding the sterol metabolism of major disease-transmitting insect. This project was with the collaboration of Dr Spencer Behmer from Texas A&M (USA). The research produced valuable results in the understanding of how insects deal with a diet poor in sterol and was published in a peer-reviewed journal. In the same institution, Dr Bouvaine was able to investigate the sap sucking insects' symbiosis and its shared metabolism. This led to one of the first accounts of a shared metabolic pathway between an insect and a bacterium and was published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Dr Bouvaine is now a research fellow at NRI and, during that last few months, has been investigating the transcriptome of cassava in order to find resistance genes for Cassava Brown Streak Virus. In addition, she is working on the insect vector of the disease and, by studying its symbiosis, she aims to find an innovative solution to disrupt the transmission of this devastating virus.
  • Research / Scholarly Interests:

    The aim of Dr Bouvaine's research is to use new molecular technologies to develop tools for the protection of important staple crops such as cassava. Her research specifically aims at deciphering the intricate mechanisms by which insect pests transmit plant-pathogenic pathogens so that this knowledge can be applied to find innovative solutions for protecting crops and hence improving the lives of people.
  • Research Projects:

    Dr Bouvaine's current project involves the use of endosymbiotic bacteria as a novel biocontrol agent for crop pests and diseases. The aim is to exploit virulent strains of the endosymbiotic bacteria, Wolbachia, as a novel biocontrol agent for controlling the harmful insect pest, whitefly, in order to protect African cassava from destructive whitefly-transmitted plant viruses. The whitefly, Bemisia tabaci, is one of the most devastating agricultural pests for poor farmers over the last three decades owing to its wide geographic spread, the diverse ways that it damages crops, its capacity to develop resistance to insecticides, and, perhaps most significantly, its ability to transmit over 110 plant viruses that cause devastating crop disease pandemics worldwide. Amongst the most important of these viruses of recent times, cassava brown streak viruses (CBSVs), which cause cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), threaten the food security of over 40 million cassava-dependent poor in eastern Africa because the disease causes complete rotting of infected tubers. The lack of disease-resistant varieties and alternative whitefly control options such as insecticides (either unavailable or too expensive for many African farmers) leaves producers completely vulnerable to the damages caused by whitefly-transmitted CBSV.
  • Greenwich Academic Literature Archive (GALA) link: https://gala.gre.ac.uk/view/authors/5995.html
  • Responsibilities:

    Research
  • Awards:
    • Former member of Royal entomological society
    • Former member of British society for plant pathology
    • Member of Entomological society of America
  • External Profiles:

    ORCID

    https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0788-3243
  • Selected Publications:
    • Teltscher, F., Bouvaine, S., Gibson, G., Dyer, P., Guest, J., Young, S., & Hopkins, R. J. (2021). Understanding mosquito host-choice behaviour: a new and low-cost method of identifying the sex of human hosts from mosquito blood meals. Parasites and Vectors, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-021-04577-w
    • Tembo, M., Adediji, A. O., Bouvaine, S., Chikoti, P. C., Seal, S. E., & Silva, G. C. (2020). A quick and sensitive diagnostic tool for detection of Maize streak virus. Scientific Reports, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598_020_76612_2
    • Chi, Y., Pan, L.-L., Bouvaine, S., Fan, Y.-Y., Liu, Y.-Q., Liu, S.-S., Seal, S., & Wang, X.-W. (2020). Differential transmission of Sri Lankan cassava mosaic virus by three cryptic species of the whitefly Bemisia tabaci complex. Virology, 540. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virol.2019.11.013
    • Ghosh, S., Bouvaine, S., Richardson, S. C. W., Ghanim, M., & Maruthi, M. N. (2018). Fitness costs associated with infections of secondary endosymbionts in the cassava whitefly species Bemisia tabaci. Journal of Pest Science, 91(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10340-017-0910-8
    • Otti, G., Bouvaine, S., Kimata, B., Mkamillo, G., Kumar, P. L., Tomlins, K., & Maruthi, M. N. (2016). High-throughput multiplex real-time PCR assay for the simultaneous quantification of DNA and RNA viruses infecting cassava plants. Journal of Applied Microbiology, 120(5). https://doi.org/10.1111/jam.13043
    • Ghosh, S., Bouvaine, S., & Maruthi, M. (2015). Prevalence and genetic diversity of endosymbiotic bacteria infecting cassava whiteflies in Africa Microbe-host interactions and microbial pathogenicity. BMC Microbiology, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12866-015-0425-5
    • Bouvaine, S., Faure, M.-L., Grebenok, R. J., Behmer, S. T., & Douglas, A. E. (2014). A dietary test of putative deleterious sterols for the aphid Myzus persicae. PLoS ONE, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0086256
    • Maruthi, M. N., Bouvaine, S., Tufan, H. A., Mohammed, I. U., & Hillocks, R. J. (2014). Transcriptional response of virus-infected cassava and identification of putative sources of resistance for cassava brown streak disease. PLoS ONE, 9(5). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096642
    • Russell, C. W., Bouvaine, S., Newell, P. D., & Douglas, A. E. (2013). Shared metabolic pathways in a coevolved insect-bacterial symbiosis. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 79(19). https://doi.org/10.1128/AEM.01543-13
    • Bouvaine, S., T.Behmer, S., Lin, G. G., Faure, M.-L., Grebenok, R. J., & Douglas, A. E. (2012). The physiology of sterol nutrition in the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum. Journal of Insect Physiology, 58(11). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinsphys.2012.07.014
    • Bouvaine, S., Boonham, N., & Douglas, A. E. (2011). Interactions between a luteovirus and the GroEL chaperonin protein of the symbiotic bacterium Buchnera aphidicola of aphids. Journal of General Virology, 92(6). https://doi.org/10.1099/vir.0.029355-0
    • Douglas, A. E., Bouvaine, S., & Russell, R. R. (2011). How the insect immune system interacts with an obligate symbiotic bacterium. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278(1704). https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.1563
Phone: +44 (0)1634 88 3158
Plant & Insect Molecular Biologist
Professor Adrienne Martin Phone: +44 (0)1634 88 3055
Director of Programme Development, Professor of Development Studies, Social and Institutional Development Specialist
Amy Guyatt Phone: +44 (0)1634 88 3474
Management Accountant (Attached to Finance Department)
Anita Rahova Project Portfolio Finance Officer (EEIG)
Elizabeth Millar Phone: +44 (0)1634 88 3199
NRI Research & Knowledge Exchange Manager
Evie Keane Phone: +44 (0)1634 88 3788
Laboratory Manager & Administrative Support
Ingrid Leduc Mwange UK Food Systems CDT Project Administrator
Joshua Muhumuza NRI Communications Coordinator
Katy Oliver
  • Biography:

    Twenty years' experience in provision of administrative and contract/financial management support to NRI. Contact point for all NRI publication enquiries. Previous experience with NRI includes PA/secretarial support, library and records management, and project control. Current role Executive Officer for the Office of the Director.
Phone: +44 (0)1634 88 3297
Senior Executive Lead

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