My research focuses on identifying specific aspects of global change that drive disease transmission and understanding the potential for rapid adaptation in infectious disease systems.
Identifying specific global change drivers of transmission
Aided by anthropogenic global change, environmentally-mediated diseases such as dengue, Lyme disease, and Valley Fever are rapidly (re)emerging and expanding. Addressing this threat to human and planetary health requires understanding and preparing for specific impacts of global change on disease risk. Yet doing so is challenging as infectious disease systems exist across ecologically and culturally diverse settings and are shaped by numerous, concurrent biotic and abiotic drivers. My work seeks to overcome these challenges by borrowing approaches for causal inference in complex systems from adjacent fields including econometrics and epidemiology. Some examples of this include:
- Identifying how vertebrate host communities shape the tick microbiome and Lyme disease transmission potential by using metagenomic sequencing and controlled lab experiments 1 2 3.
- Estimating the impact of past climate warming on Lyme disease incidence in the U.S. using a panel regression approach, and using oserved relationships to project disease burdens under future warming scenarios 4.
- Investigating the impact of oil and gas well drilling on Valley Fever incidence using a case-crossover approach (work in prep).
Potential for rapid adaptation
As climate change is poised to cause massive shifts in disease distributions and burdens, predicting these shifts is a major theme in biological research that is critical for public health preparedness. Yet virtually all current projections assume that pathogens and vectors will not evolve in response to environmental change, as their adaptive potential remains unknown. A recent aim of my work has been to estimate the potential for adaptive evolution in infectious disease systems, drawing on concepts and approaches from conservation biology and evolutionary genomics.
- Identifying data gaps in estimating evolutionary potential in mosquito heat toelarnce 5.
- Establishing a novel model system for investigating environmental tolerance and host-parasite interactions in mosquitoes
- Investigating the evidence for local adaptation in mosquito heat tolerance across a species range 6.
- Estimating potential rates of adaptive evolution in comparison to climte warming by measuring responses to selection and genomic variation in mosquito heat tolerance [coming soon!]
