Rambaut was based at Oxford until 2006, when he took up a
Royal Society University Research Fellowship position and became Chair of Molecular Evolution at Edinburgh in 2010. His research is primarily on the "evolutionary and epidemiological study of
viral pathogens of humans and animals". this is freely available on GitHub. A year later, Rambaut set up
Virological.org, an online "discussion forum for molecular evolution and epidemiology of viruses". Rambaut has used genome sequencing to track the spread of
monkeypox. His research suggests that cases outside Africa are all related and that the virus responsible may have been circulating in people since 2017.
COVID-19 Science reported on 11 January 2020 that Rambaut was the first to publish the genome of the
COVID-19 coronavirus after it was sent to him by
Edward C. Holmes. Holmes has said that it "took 52 minutes from receiving the code [from his Chinese colleague Professor
Yong-Zhen Zhang] to publishing" on Virological. The BBC
Horizon episode
The Vaccine stated: "When Chinese scientists published the genetic sequence of a mystery new virus on January 10th 2020, vaccine scientists around the world immediately sprang into action." Rambaut was one of the authors of the scientific paper
The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, which concluded that "
SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus". The paper led to scientific and political allegations in 2023, when Republican politicians in the US made accusations that the paper was a cover-up to eliminate the
lab leak theory. The paper and the controversy became known as the
Proximal Origin. Rambaut was an attendee of the UK government's
Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).
Awards and honours Rambaut was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2022, having been a
Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) since 2014. Rambaut was awarded the 2025
Darwin Medal by the
Royal Society. ==References==