5 reasons to attend the NFU Poultry Research Seminar – register today

During his time on the NFU Poultry Board, Will would like to place emphasis on better UK food security.

He is passionate about promoting the high standards of UK poultry to consumers, stakeholders and politicians.

As a former PIP (Poultry Industry Programme) participant, he was crowned the PIP award winner in 2021, receiving a prize from the Worshipful Company of Poulters.

Will operates a mixed farm in the north of England. The farm comprises 250 acres of combinable crops as well as broilers, supplying the independent poultry sector and growing for Frank Bird.

Alongside the farming enterprise, Will has invested heavily in solar panels and biomass boilers in attempts to achieve net zero.

His farm business has partnered with a farm-based AI company, Pondus. His farm is the principal Research and Development site, and Will is actively involved in the development of their farm management software systems.

He currently is a member of the UK joint industry and government taskforce on HPAI vaccination.

He is also a member of the World Egg Organisation expert group on Avian Influenza.

Ian holds a visiting Professorship position in Avian Virology at the University of Nottingham.

He has published over 270 peer review papers principally on influenza in animal hosts.

Ian was chair of OFFLU (WOAH-FAO international network for animal influenza) in 2019-2025 and was awarded the OBE in the 2019 New Year’s honour’s list for services to Animal Health and Welfare.

Ian was PI on the FLUMAP project and currently leads Flutrailmap-avian and will present the key findings at the NFU research meeting.

Following postdoctoral research and a RCUK fellowship position she was appointed to a Lectureship at the Royal Veterinary College in 2012.

Her research interests cover animal behaviour and welfare with a focus on poultry.

These encompass both fundamental work on perception, cognition, and behaviour as well as more applied multidisciplinary research evaluating welfare during rearing, end of life and in specific situations and collaborating with social scientists to understand societal contexts.

A key theme that spans all areas of his research is the investigation of the role of intervention policies in the control and management of infectious disease outbreaks.

He is Principal Investigator on several multi-institute grants that typically work at the interface between science and policy, focusing upon the development of novel infectious disease models, often in data poor environments and working closely with stakeholders to devise strategies to minimize disease impact.

Specifically, the work of his group focuses upon fitting mathematical models to epidemics and simulating the effectiveness of alternate control policies to establish optimal strategies for disease control in the future.

His models have been applied during outbreaks (most notably the 2001 and 2007 outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing H5N1 outbreak in the UK), in the aftermath of outbreaks (e.g. the Japan 2010 FMD outbreak, the 2014 Ebola epidemic) and also for contingency planning purposes for future outbreaks.

Throughout his career he has been involved in communicating with policy makers and advising regarding optimal control strategies to mitigate outbreaks of infectious diseases.

The outputs from his models have been reported directly to agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of Agriculture, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations and the World Organisation for Animal Health.

She has recently been involved in the development of an automated system for the assessment of welfare in broiler chickens (OpticFlock) under the SMART BROILER program supported by the Foundation for Food & Agricultural Research.