2024 Emerging Leaders Prize - 1st Place Winner, £100,000: Dr Daniel Padfield, Research Fellow, University of Exeter

Dr Daniel Padfield is an evolutionary ecologist, whose research has led to breakthroughs in understanding how rising temperatures affect the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.

Microbial communities have profound impacts on the planet through carbon and nutrient cycling, as well as on human health, through bacterial infections and our own microbiomes. Dr Padfield's research has demonstrated how phytoplankton can rapidly evolve to warmer temperatures by reducing respiration (which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere) relative to photosynthesis (which sucks carbon dioxide in).

His more recent work has focused on understanding bacterial evolution in natural communities in Cornwall, where he used statistical tools to model how bacteria transition between land, marine, and freshwater environments. He has also used his expertise in programming to help compile a list of over 1500 bacteria capable of infecting humans, demonstrating that human pathogens are scattered across the whole bacterial evolutionary ‘family tree’.

Right now, he aims to address the lack of causal understanding between antibiotic resistance and climate warming, and their corresponding effects on human health. The Emerging Leaders Prize will allow Dr Padfield to run controlled experiments in the lab to explore exactly how rising temperatures affect the spread of antibiotic resistance, which will make future predictions around the phenomenon more accurate.

Ultimately, Dr Padfield’s ambition is to lead an open, creative research group specialising in climate change ecology and health research, to improve our knowledge of how environmental change impacts microbes and the key global functions they control.