06/02/08
Mr George Gunn, SAC Professor of Population Medicine and Zoonoses
will be giving his Inaugural Professorial Lecture entitled ‘Specialisation
in Generalisation: Veterinary Research in a Highland Location’ in
Inverness on Friday 15 February 2008 at 13:30.
The lecture will look at the changing population dynamics in the
Highlands; the ebb of the population over the preceding centuries
and the rejuvenating flow over the last few decades. It will touch
on the export of a culture and its global effects, lost managerial
skills, and the departure of young people seeking an education
in larger population centres. It will go on to look at the return
of some young people to the Highlands and the resulting resurgence
of Scottish culture. This population flow into the Highlands and
the creation of a focus for university education in the Highlands,
should help support the resurgence and revitalisation in the Northern
economy.
The presentation will explore the need for and the definitions
of population medicine, epidemiology and zoonoses (diseases that
could be transmitted from animals to humans) and explain how such
diseases have evolved. It will explore how developments in human
medicine combined with epidemiology have led to a new way of measuring
and exploring diseases.
This will be developed to review the academic progress of Professor
Gunn and how his journey led to new challenges; from traditional
livestock medicine through disease outbreak investigation, pathology
and disease control to training in analytical epidemiology overseas.
Professor Gunn will go on to describe how he and his research team
have built upon the language of veterinary medicine, layering it
with statistics, mathematics, economics and a smattering of social
science to pool existing information together in statistical and
mathematical models, blending the results with economics and findings
from social science to feed the need for improved decision making
about animal diseases and their control.
The lecture will conclude by describing how an earlier path away
from the Highlands later re-emerged in Inverness, coinciding with
and contributing to a flow of young, intelligent people back to
the Highlands. People armed with open minds and modern technology
who are able to make some innovative impact on the rest of the
world.
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