I am a quantitative disease ecologist who studies infectious disease transmission in human and animal populations using both statistical and data-driven mathematical models.
Photo of razorbills on the Isle of May, Scotland
- My current work at EcoHealth Alliance seeks to understand the diversity, distribution, and spillover of bat-borne viruses in South Africa. This work is in collaboration with the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
- My recent postdoctoral work with the USGS ARMI (Amphibian Research and Monitoring Institute) sought to understand the effects of Bd (chytrid fungus) in a diverse assemblage of amphibians across the US. In this work I built multi-species, multi-site capture-mark-recapture models with latent disease processes in Stan.
- My previous postdoctoral work at Stanford sought to understand how changing land-use affects the spread of disease, using dengue, malaria, and yellow fever transmission in South America as case studies. I also worked to resolve which hosts and mosquitoes drive Ross River virus transmission (a generalist pathogen infecting birds, marsupials, and placental mammals including humans) in different regions of Australia. Finally, in early 2020 I participated in COVID-19 modeling; specifically, I helped to make early forecasts and understand the impacts of superspreading on epidemic dynamics.
- My PhD research was similar to my postdoc work but focused more on wildlife disease and was composed of equal parts pathogen evolution (with a focus on the myxoma virus in European rabbits) and pathogen transmission (primarily West Nile virus in birds; spillover into humans). In addition to my work in disease ecology I am passionate about reproducibility in science and clean and clear statistical analyses; I work to improve statistical practice and the communication of statistical results in science (work with Ben Bolker and Jonathan Dushoff at McMaster University).
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Photo of razorbills on the Isle of May, Scotland