Dr. Declan Schroeder was appointed in February 2018, through the Agricultural Research, Education, Extension and Technology Transfer (AGREETT) program, as an Associate Professor of Virology in the Veterinary Population Medicine Department in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota. He also holds an honorary Chair in Viral Metagenomics in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. Previously, he held the positions of Director of the MBA Culture Collection (2014-2018) and Senior Research Fellow in Viral and Molecular Ecology (2001-2018) at the Marine Biological Association of the UK. He has over 20 years of research experience as a molecular biologist in the areas of virology, biodiversity, pathology and genomics – in particular the use of genomic tools to study key biological processes. Moreover, his track record in winning and administered research projects (over $8 million equivalent from 10 different funders), collaborated with other researchers (within departments, nationally and internationally), and produced several high impact peer-reviewed publications (4 Nature & Science papers). He has also enjoyed mentoring and teaching the next generation of scientists. To date he has mentored 9 postdoctoral assistants/fellows, 15 PhD students, 18 Masters students and 7 graduate students. In summary, he has a demonstrated record of accomplished research and teaching in an area of relevance for environmental and animal health sciences.