Oliver Pybus, Professor of Infectious Disease at the Royal Veterinary College, has been influential in both the academic development and application to medicine of pathogen phylodynamics and genomic epidemiology. He has been instrumental in demonstrating that real-time virus genomics can inform public health responses during outbreaks. These approaches are increasingly being integrated into surveillance and epidemic control systems worldwide. He has helped bring new ideas to the medical sciences from other fields, particularly from evolutionary biology, ecology, genomics, computational biology and statistics, and he continues to explore the application of new technologies such as machine learning and metagenomics to infectious disease epidemiology.