My research laboratory addresses questions at the intersection of infectious diseases and environmental change. We use field, laboratory, and computational approaches and our work ranges from basic epidemiologic and risk-factor studies to serologic surveys to developing new data collection tools and pathways.
Most of our work fits into one or more of these areas:
- Environmental Change and Infectious Diseases — From habitat destruction to climatic change and urbanization, infectious disease pathogens are constantly reacting to environmental change. We seek to better characterize and describe those changes and explain what they mean for human health.
- Novel Tools to Evaluate Health Outcomes — We are developing new tools that can be deployed in high and low resource settings to accurately evaluate human health.
- Reassessing the Burden of Neglected Infectious Diseases — How we understand and measure the burden of an infectious disease incentivizes or disincentivizes efforts towards elimination, eradication, or control. A large group of infectious diseases are neglected not because they don’t cause suffering, but because traditional approaches are often bad at measuring and putting into context the resulting detrimental costs. We use novel assessment tools and methods to measure the human cost of infection and create models for global burden to incentivize action.
- Characterizing, Evaluating, and Mitigating Pandemic Threats — In addition to working to better understand the burden of SARS-CoV-2, we are working to develop diagnostic and computational approaches to understand what pathogens might pose the highest pandemic risk in the future.
