Prof Mark Brown

I grew up in Warwickshire and went to state schools in Southam, before studying Zoology at the University of Oxford.

I did my PhD on the behavioural ecology of seed-harvesting ants at Stanford University with Deborah Gordon. After a brief period of unemployment, I moved to ETH-Zürich where I did post-docs with Paul Schmid-Hempel on the evolutionary ecology of host-parasite interactions in bumblebees.

In 2002 I established my own research group at Trinity College Dublin, where we carried on working with bumblebees and their parasites, and also branched out into the conservation of wild bees. In 2008 we moved to Royal Holloway University of London, where we continued our previous work, whilst also conducting research into the impacts of agrochemicals on managed and wild bees.

We moved the lab to Cambridge in 2026, where I am also lucky enough to be the Director of the Zoology Museum.

Research

How do parasites and hosts interact with each other? How does this determine the health of hosts? How do anthropogenic changes affect these relationships? As ~50% of animal species are parasites, and all animals have parasites, addressing these questions is key to understanding the biology of the natural world. Our main study system is bumblebees, an ecologically important group of pollinators, and their parasites. Pollination is a key ecosystem service, which supports natural ecosystems and human health (through the production of food). Consequently, pollinator health is central to a functioning planet, providing an important applied focus to our research.

We focus on the following areas: (i) the ecology and evolutionary epidemiology of natural parasites in bees, (ii) the epidemiology and impact of emergent diseases in bees, (iii) the role of floral resources as ‘pharmaceuticals’ to mitigate infection dynamics, and (iv) the impact of agrochemicals on wild bee health. In addition, we have broad interests in the behaviour, ecology, and evolution of social insects, particularly the ecologically important bees and ants. We aim to deepen our understanding of fundamental biology, whilst providing evidence-based solutions to the challenges faced by wild bees in our anthropogenically-impacted world.

Publications

Key publications:

Wolmuth-Gordon HS, Koricheva J, Brown MJF (2025) Meta-analysis finds large variation but no general patterns in the relationship between climate and parasitism in terrestrial animals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 122: e2508970122

Nicholson CC, Knapp J, Kiljanek T, Albrecht M, Chauzat M-P, Costa C, De la Rùa P, Klein A-M, Mänd M, Potts SP, Schweiger O, Bottero I, Cini E, de Miranda JR, Di Prisco G, Dominik C, Hodge S, Kaunath V, Knauer A, Laurent M, Martínez-Lòpez V, Medrzycki P, Pereira-Peixoto MH, Raimets R, Schwarz JM, Senapathi D, Tamburini G, Brown MJF, Stout JC, Rundlöf M (2024) Pesticide use negatively affects bumble bees across European landscapes. Nature 628:355-358

Zhuang M, Colgan TJ, Guo Y, Zhang Z, Liu F, Xia Z, Dai X, Zhang Z, Li Y, Wang L, Xu J, Guo Y, Qu Y, Yao J, Yang H, Yang F, Li X, Guo J, Brown MJF, Li J (2023) Unexpected worker mating and colony-founding in a superorganism. Nature Communications 14:5499

Brown MJF (2022) Complex networks of parasites and pollinators: moving towards a healthy balance. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 377:20210161

Siviter H, Bailes EJ, Martin CD, Oliver TR, Koricheva J, Leadbeater E, Brown MJF (2021) Agrochemicals interact synergistically to increase bee mortality. Nature 596:389-392

Folly AJ, Koch H, Farrell IW, Stevenson PC, Brown MJF (2021) Agri-environment scheme nectar chemistry can suppress the social epidemiology of parasites in an important pollinator. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 288:20210363

Koch H, Woodward J, Langat MK, Brown MJF, Stevenson PC (2019) Flagellum removal by a nectar metabolite inhibits infectivity of a bumblebee parasite. Current Biology 29:3494-3500

Siviter H, Brown MJF, Leadbeater E (2018) Sulfoxaflor exposure reduces bumblebee reproductive success. Nature 561:109-112

Fürst MA, McMahon DP, Osborne JL, Paxton RJ, Brown MJF (2014) Disease associations between honeybees and bumblebees as a threat to wild pollinators. Nature 506:364-366

Find a full, up-to-date list of publications, including forthcoming preprints, on my google scholar page.

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