Welcome
Our lab is jointly in the Odum School of Ecology and the Department of Infectious Diseases at the College of Veterinary Medicine. We are interested in the epidemiological, ecological and evolutionary consequences of host-parasite interactions and are committed to developing theory and testable predictions in the field of infectious disease epidemiology. Research is a combination of data analysis and theoretical methodology (e.g. computer simulation of disease outbreaks). Much of our work is motivated by field and laboratory data (e.g. equine influenza and epizootic hemorrhagic disease, EHD, of white-tailed deer), which leads to inter-disciplinary research with veterinarians, virologists, geneticists and ecologists, among others.
We are particularly interested in heterogeneities in host-parasite interactions and how processes at different scales connect. As an example: Influenza has proved a great study system to address many of these issues as it is a system in which both the pathogen and the host have a heterogeneous structure, and where there is also partial cross-immunity between strains. We have used experimental infection studies in horses to begin to understand the epidemiological consequences of partial cross-immunity. These data have been used to build new mathematical models which link small-scale processes such as amino acid substitutions in viral proteins to the risk of large epidemics in host populations. Our research on EHD is motivated by data collected at SCWDS, UGA over 30 years. We are using the data to establish the relative importance of immunological and environmental dynamics in explaining the complex spatio-temporal disease patterns observed in the US.
Join us
We have funding available at the post-doc & grad student level (more details).