Rob Wallace received a Ph.D. in biology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and did post-doctorate work at the University of California, Irvine, with Walter Fitch, a founder of molecular phylogeny. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he is both a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota and a deli clerk at a local sandwich shop.
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"Rob Wallace's new book is an important polemic that argues that we, as a society, should be a lot more concerned about the potential for disease to decimate the human population. It is very much a question of not if, but when. Wallace's work is important because it argues that the key problem is not inadequate science, nor ineffectual medicine (though at times these may be issues) but an approach to the question which fails to see the systematic way that capitalism has transformed our relationship to the wider eco-system in ways that encourage the spread, mutation and virulence of disease."--Martin Empson "ResoluteReader " "The emergence and evolution of influenza is clearly intertwined with neoliberal economic practices that put surplus value over use value. After reading Wallace's book, one cannot be surprised any longer..."--Jonathan Everts "Antipode " "Rob Wallace's 2016 book, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science in many ways should have served as a forewarning for the current coronavirus outbreak."--Sam Belton "Socialist Party " "The popular narrative of deadly viruses emerging from wild animal reservoirs clearly appeals to humankind's deeply rooted fascination with wildlife and its dangers. But isn't such a focus on the zoonotic origin of emerging infectious diseases distracting attention from the more important social, economic, and cultural forces operating at different spatial and temporal scales and contributing to the chain of causality leading to epidemics? In his book, [...] evolutionary ecologist Rob Wallace calls on virology, phylogeography, political ecology, mathematical modelling, and economics to tackle those questions by taking us on a rich and fascinating journey through the multiple layers of causality in the emergence of disease. "--Marius Gilbert "Lancet Infectious Diseases "