Colin’s research focuses on the relationship between climate change and two irreversible processes of global change: biodiversity loss and infectious disease emergence. His most significant work to date has been leading a study that estimated parasite extinction rates from climate change, a project for which he assembled the largest spatial database of macroparasite occurrences currently available to researchers worldwide. His other projects fall at various points on the gradient between conservation biology and public health, and have included the extinction status and history of high-profile species like the Carolina parakeet, Spix’s macaw, and the thylacine; the impacts of climate change on host-parasite assemblages and the need for parasite conservation; and the eco-epidemiology of emerging diseases like anthrax, Ebola and Zika virus.