Macroecology of Infectious Disease
A current major focus of research in my lab is large-scale patterns of disease biodiversity,
an area in which many basic questions of wide interest remain to be answered. For
example, whether parasites follow the same macroecological rules that tend to apply
to free living species is largely unknown (see this paper for an overview). One of my recent projects is on the effects of phylogeny, range
overlap, and ecological similarity on patterns of parasite sharing among wild ungulate
species.
This study also considered for the first time the effects of sampling bias on apparent patterns
of parasite overlap among hosts (i.e., are pairs of well-studied hosts more likely
to have known shared parasites than poorly studied hosts), and the degree to which
trophic links promote the spread of parasites among distantly related species (in
this case for ungulate parasites to be shared with carnivore hosts). Another recent project investigated methods for extrapolating large scale (e.g., global) patterns of parasite
biodiversity from the sparse data on parasite distributions that are currently available,
and much of my current work applies a macroecological perspective to more applied
questions such as elucidating the ecological and anthropogenic factors that promote
the spillover of zoonotic disease from wildlife to humans.
Much of my work to date has been associated with a NSF (in collaboration with NIH and USDA) funded research coordination network focused on the macroecology of infectious disease that I have been leading for the last six years. You can read more about our work here. I am also currently leading a multi-year project (funded by NIH) to study the factors that promote the spillover of Ebolavirus and other filoviruses from wild mammal hosts to humans in Africa, a collaborative project between researchers at OSU and the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases at UGA. We will are investigating the role of ecological factors such as climate and host richness, as well as anthropogenic a socioeconomic factors such as human encroachment into wild areas and poverty. Associated with this work, I will have a number of opportunities for students and post-doctoral scholars.