Interests

Broadly, I am interested in the ecology of disease in wildlife and humans. More specifically, my interests include understanding the impacts of urbanization on:

• wildlife health
• host-pathogen interactions
• human-wildlife interactions

Graduate Research

Dissertation Projects:

• Granular spatial analysis of vector-borne pathogen exposure risk in owned companion animals in Georgia, USA with Nicole Gottdenker DVM, MS, PhD, Dipl. ACVP.
• Sociodemographic and ecological associations with county-level human cases of Murine Typhus in Texas, USA.
• Anthropogenic roosting and viral diversity in bats using a machine learning approach with Daniel Becker, PhD and viral association data from Verena Consortium. Preliminary analysis was presented at ESA 2022 and the poster can be downloaded here.

Other projects:

• 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. Look out for the paper in my publication section!

Undergraduate Research

My undergraduate research focussed 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.