Patricia (Pat) Anne Nuttall, is known for her research on ticks and tick-borne viruses. Her discoveries include the fact that pathogens can be transmitted between vectors feeding on a host without being detectable in the host’s blood. She was the director of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (2001–11). As of 2015, she became Professor of Arbovirology in the Department of Biology, University of Oxford, and is now Emeritus Professor having retired in 2017. She is a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.  She gained a BSc in microbiology at the University of Bristol in 1974. Her PhD in virology (1978), under the supervision of Jim Stott and C. Kaplan, was at the Institute of Animal Health. From 1977, Nuttall undertook post-doctoral research at the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford and the NERC Unit of Invertebrate Virology in Oxford.

In the early 1980s, Nuttall and her team started to study viruses transmitted by ticks. They discovered that a virus can be transmitted between infected and uninfected ticks when they feed simultaneously on apparently uninfected guinea pigs, without the virus being present at a detectable level in the blood. Nuttall’s collaborative work has focused on discovering the function of tick saliva’s many constituents, as well as the mechanisms by which tick-transmitted pathogens use them to enhance their transmission. Nuttall has shown that tick saliva suppresses the host’s antiviral immune responses, including natural killer cell activity and the induction of type I interferon and cytokines involved in inflammation. Her group and her many collaborators have also shown that the proteins in saliva differ between individual ticks of the same species and also change over the course of feeding.

Nuttall received the Ivanovsky Medal for Virology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1996 and the Harry Hoogstraal Medal of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 2016. She was awarded the OBE in the 2000 New Year Honours List, for “services to Environmental Science and Policy.”