Dr Holly Broadhurst

Biography	I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Infectious Disease Ecology at the University of Salford, where my current work takes a One Health approach to understanding and controlling tick-borne diseases. I focus on manipulating reservoir host communities at the landscape scale and have adapted retrotransposon-based blood meal analysis (rt-BMA) for UK species to identify host–vector interactions. My research journey began with a passion for wildlife conservation and molecular ecology, which led me to pursue a PhD in partnership with NatureScot. My doctoral research validated the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) as a powerful and cost-effective tool for monitoring terrestrial and semi-aquatic mammals—especially elusive, invasive, or threatened species.
Research Interests	Environmental DNA (eDNA), wildlife conservation, terrestrial and semi-aquatic mammal monitoring, molecular ecology, infectious disease ecology, tick-borne diseases, One Health, vector-host-pathogen interactions, biodiversity monitoring, non-invasive molecular techniques, citizen science, community engagement in ecology, conservation genomics, science communication.

Biography

I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Infectious Disease Ecology at the University of Salford, where my current work takes a One Health approach to understanding and controlling tick-borne diseases. I focus on manipulating reservoir host communities at the landscape scale and have adapted retrotransposon-based blood meal analysis (rt-BMA) for UK species to identify host–vector interactions.

My research journey began with a passion for wildlife conservation and molecular ecology, which led me to pursue a PhD in partnership with NatureScot. My doctoral research validated the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) as a powerful and cost-effective tool for monitoring terrestrial and semi-aquatic mammals—especially elusive, invasive, or threatened species.

Research Interests

Environmental DNA (eDNA), wildlife conservation, terrestrial and semi-aquatic mammal monitoring, molecular ecology, infectious disease ecology, tick-borne diseases, One Health, vector-host-pathogen interactions, biodiversity monitoring, non-invasive molecular techniques, citizen science, community engagement in ecology, conservation genomics, science communication.