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Alex D Greenwood
Summary
Alex Greenwood is the head of the Department of Wildlife Diseases of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany. He also holds a faculty position in the Department of Veterinary Medicine of the Freie Universität Berlin. He studied biology at Cornell University, B.A. before entering the PhD program in Human Genetics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he was awarded his PhD in 1996. He then moved to Germany on a National Science Foundation sponsored fellowship to study ancient DNA where he began merging his interests in evolutionary biology and virology. He continued this line of research through additional postdoc experience both in the US at the American Museum of Natural History where he is a Research Associate and at the Institute of Virology of the Helmholz Center in Munich. He continues to work on retroviruses using novel metagenomic approaches and ancient DNA methods and has a growing interest in cross species transmission of herpesviruses, particularly in captive animal populations. He recently worked on resolving the cause of encephalitis and ulitmate death of the famous polar bear Knut of the Berlin Zoological Garden.
Biodiversity Evolutionary Studies Genomics Infectious Diseases Virology