Research
Postdoctoral research: Identifying and Validating Missing Links in the Global Bat–Virus Network
A major challenge to the field of disease ecology is fully characterizing host–pathogen networks because species interaction data is often incomplete and biased, owing to the high logistical costs (e.g., time and funding) and thus infeasibility of exhaustive sampling of these associations. This has consequences for the prevention and control of diseases of human, domestic animal, and wildlife concern. Predicting missing links in the global bat-virus network is of particular interest because many bat associated viruses have high zoonotic potential and the investment in the surveillance of these viruses is high, leading to a growing body of available data. In addition, bats show intraspecific variation in roosting ecology as many bat species are found to occupy both anthropogenic and natural structure types, thus potentially shaping virus presence and viral communities within species. This project aims to identify unrecorded, but likely, bat–virus family associations, which will then be used to inform hypothesis-driven fieldwork. I will quantify the probability of interactions between bat species and virus families with link prediction models and then test these predictions as well as assess intraspecific variation in associations across roost structure type (anthropogenic or natural) in bats sampled in Oklahoma and Texas.
Graduate Research
The rapid global conversion of natural habitat to built environments create corridors that facilitate cross-species transmission at the human–domestic animal–wildlife interface. Understanding pathogen outcomes of animals that live directly at this interface will provide insight into the transmission dynamics of pathogens that pose risk to companion animals, wildlife, and humans. This dissertation is comprised of two sections where I studied pathogen outcomes in two groups of animals that live directly alongside humans: wildlife that live in anthropogenic structures (eg, buildings, bridges, homes, and tunnels, etc.) and companion animals. In the first section, a novel database of anthropogenic roosting ecology in bats was created to identify ecological and evolutionary determinants of anthropogenic roosting ability. Then,the importance of this ability in predicting viral outcomes was assessed using a machine learning approach. In the second section of this dissertation, data was compiled from veterinary diagnostic reports to evaluate the influence of climactic and land use factors on vector-borne pathogen exposure risk in canines.
Other projects during dissertation:
- Spatial distribution of COVID-19 hospitalization risk in the greater Austin area, USA in collaboration with Emily Javan and the UT Modeling Consortium. This work was presented at the 2020 UT COVID Conference and the poster can be found here.
- Descriptive analysis of Bartonella spp. in companion animals paired with pediatric cases of Cat-Scratch disease in Georgia, USA with Christina A. Rostad, MD and team and Nicole Gottdenker DVM, MS, PhD, Dipl. ACVP. This work has been accepted for publication at Open Forum Infectious Diseases. Paper can be found here.
Undergraduate Research
My undergraduate research focused on assessing the relationship between stress levels, determined by fecal glucocorticoids, and forage quality in Sonoran pronghorn with David Christianson, PhD in the Wildlife Endocrinology Lab.