Projects & Publications

• Communicating risk of vector-borne pathogens is hard - especially if you're trying to communicate risk to someone who lives in an area that either 1) isn't under active pathogen surveillance or 2) lives in an surveyed area but a pathogen hasn't been detected (yet!). 

• To help vector surveillance programs better communicate risk of a pathogen(s), the goal of this broad project is to use various modeling approaches to learn associations between patterns of mosquito collections/virus detections and various climatic and environmental variables surrounding a surveillance site.

• We will then use these models to project arbovirus detection probabilities into un-sampled spaces as well as generate work flows that can generate these projections in real-time AND make them available on the internet.

• On-going projects are investigating how to predict and project West Nile virus, St. Louis Encephalitis virus, Eastern equine encephalitis virus, and the spread of Aedes spp. mosquitoes in different locations throughout the United States

• Control of mosquito populations through the use of larvicides is arguably the most common form of pest control for mosquitoes in the US. We have lots of data that when you apply a larvicide, it kills mosquito larvae. We have less data on whether those reductions in larval collections actually lead to reductions in adults populations; we have even less data on whether larval control actually reduces risk of pathogen transmission to humans.

• These are difficult questions to answer, and I have in the past attempted to answer these questions using field experiments and field observations of active mosquito control programs. We've managed to find some indication that larval control - at the scale of an entire city - can reduce overall mosquito abundance, but we're still missing that link to reductions in risk of disease.

• The lack of a signal could be driven by many factors - one of which is simply the limitation of 1-3 year field projects in small areas that generate an insufficient amount of data to investigate such a question. We may have a better chance of detecting signatures of mosquito control on pathogen risk reduction if we study very large areas covered by well funded mosquito abatement districts.

• Experimental design can also impact vector control assessment. Control districts face many operational hurdles when implementing different control tactics, and some of the lab's work focuses on helping these districts design more efficient and impactful studies through the use of modeling and simulation approaches.

• If analyzing existing data is one way to investigate a problem, our boots-on-the-ground studies in Lubbock are another. 

• We are using a series of field and lab approaches to help improve the operational, entomological, and epidemiological outcomes of vector control programs in the West Texas/ High Plain's region. These are very new and applied projects, so check back for updates on this work.

• This project is funded by the CDC in collaboration with the Rockies and High Plain's Vector-borne disease Center for Training and Evaluation (RaHP VEC), Dr. Corey Brelsfoard of TTU's Department of Biological Sciences, and members of the City of Lubbock's Department of Environmental Health's Vector Control Unit. For more specific information on this Center and our collaborators, please see the RaHP VEC tab!

A passion more than a specific project!

The biodiversity-disease research paradigm blends community and disease ecology concepts together to investigate how changes in the structure of ecological communities results in functional changes in pathogen transmission. Much of this theory is grounded in vector-borne diseases, yet initial theory development assumed vector communities were homogeneous - all individuals were the same and fed on hosts at random.

That is simply not the case. Mosquito diversity - species, behaviors, host choice, oviposition site selection, etc. - varies widely, and my dissertation and postdoc work (as well as other great researchers!) found there are limitations of the original assumption of mosquito community homogeneity. 

I continue to generally pursue ecological research topics related to mosquito community composition at all spatial and temporal levels. Projects in this realm can be slow to develop, but I find them extremely exciting and rewarding!  

We are currently designing projects that synthesize ecological theory, genetic data, and mathematical tools within the realms of network theory and topological data analysis to understand how spatial scale influences population structure and connectivity in Ae. aegypti (sub)populations throughout the southwest