RICHARD WILLIAMS is an Assistant Professor in Microbiology at Complutense University Madrid (UCM), Spain, and a research associate at the University of Kansas (KU), USA. He completed his undergraduate degree (2002) at the Open University, UK and a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (2010) at the Biodiversity Institute (KU). Since defending his doctoral work, he has held postdoctoral research positions at UCM, Linnaeus University, Sweden and the University of Derby, UK, and a teaching position at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus. He rejoined UCM in 2021 as Visiting Professor in Virology in the prestigious Strategic Enhancement programme, and became Assistant Professor in 2023. He is a member of the Virus Animales research group at KU. His major areas of study are the epidemiology, spatial ecology, and host-pathogen interactions of bird viruses, especially for groups, including Adenovirus, Flavivirus, Influenza, Papillomavirus and Poxvirus.