“By co-designing integrated, cloud-native data capture and analysis environments with our industry partners, we’ll enable farm managers and industry regulators to interact with multiple data types – including AMR and biosecurity sources – at scale.”

Professor Ricardo J. Soares Magalhães is the Analytics Program Lead at SAAFE CRC and a veterinarian with extensive research experience spanning human and animal public health. He specialises in the geospatial epidemiological modelling of zoonotic diseases, surveillance system design, and evaluating biosecurity interventions to reduce zoonotic hazards – including antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

His interest in AMR was first forged 20 years ago when he was investigating golden staph infections in companion animals. The study showed animals whose owners worked in human healthcare were more likely to become infected – demonstrating the need to adopt a cross-sectoral investigative angle and apply a One Health approach.

Ricardo’s current research supports the development of new disease mapping approaches for the integrated planning and evaluation of zoonotic disease control.

At SAAFE CRC, he’s focused on optimising antimicrobial surveillance, as well as antimicrobial use and biosecurity decision-making by facilitating industry-led research into the development of cloud-native data capture infrastructure and data analysis methods.

Ricardo works closely with our partners to co-design research that’s statistically robust, bias-sensitive, and follows good epidemiological design principles. He also contributes to our training mission, with a particular passion for training the next generation of One Health epidemiologists and ensuring they are confident to collaborate with industry.

Ricardo’s other notable positions include: Professor of Zoonotic Disease Epidemiology at the University of Queensland (2023-present) , and Biosecurity and Director of the Queensland Alliance for One Health Sciences at the University of Queensland (2021-present).