Sustainability Leadership Fellowship Cohort: 2015-2016

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology

Research Summary: Climate change and human factors, such as land use and globalization, continue to facilitate the emergence of new viruses. I am interested in detecting new viruses before they become a global threat and the ecological factors that direct virus evolution. My research involves a combination of field work, laboratory experimentation, and computation biology. First, I am collecting human blood-fed mosquitoes to detect pathogens from remote areas in West Africa. In the lab, I am examining how different interactions of mosquitoes and birds can impact West Nile virus evolution and alter the outcome of infection.