This semester we welcome Daniel Suh and Grant Foster to the lab. Daniel is starting his PhD in Ecology/IDEAS with interests in parasites and invasive species. Previously, Daniel earned his BS in Biology from Pepperdine and worked as a research…
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Annakate will attend the 73rd Annual Conference of the Southeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies this Fall, after winning a competitive stipend. The meeting will allow Annakate to hear research from state and federal agencies, citizen’s organizations, universities, and…
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Andrew led a recent study aimed at characterizing the phylogenetic specialism of around 1500 mammal parasites, finding that patterns of specialism vary among parasite types and transmission modes. Some parasites show an aggregation in the host phylogeny consistent with a…
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John was involved in a research project, recently published in Ecology and Evolution, that developed and tested a model to estimate the number of mammal species using taxonomic records. In a study led by Molly Fisher, in collaboration with John…
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Andrew was involved in a link prediction problem study with recent Odum graduate, Tad Dallas and colleague John Drake, which was recently published in PLoS Computational Biology. They wanted to (i) estimate missing but likely links in a host-parasite network, (ii)…
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Andrew and lab alum Laura were involved in a recent study demonstrating the spatio-temporal risk of Ebola spillover in Africa. Using historical spillover data, the research (published in Emerging Infectious Diseases with lead author JP Schmidt of the Odum School of…
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Congratulations to Jenna on being awarded a summer 2017 CURO Fellowship to continue her studies in the lab. Jenna is researching patterns of tick diversity in the mammalian phylogeny to lay the foundations for better understanding the distribution of tick-borne…
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David Vasquez, co-advised by Vanessa Ezenwa and Andrew Park, is pursuing his doctorate as part of the Interdisciplinary Disease Ecology Across Scales program. His research interests include disease ecology, social network theory, animal behavior, co-infection dynamics, ecoimmunology, and ecophysiology. Congratulations!
Unsampled host species may associate with parasites of interest, but it can be challenging to predict with which species a given parasite will associate. We tested the predictability of a parasite’s host range (the set of host species it can infect)…
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Led by Chris Dibble, we recently published a paper in JRS Interface that asked the question, “As R0 increases through 1, how long until a disease outbreak?”. Many systems have slowly increasing parasite fitness whether it’s through parasite evolution, demographic susceptible…
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