Research
We study how pathogens and people interact, from the molecular to the global scales. Our ongoing efforts include:
Making viral kinetics a pillar of surveillance
Epidemics are shaped by microbiology, physiology, and behavior. Viral kinetics are the critical link that translates across these scales: the time-course of viral levels in the body during an infection reflects the struggle between the virus and the immune system while also forming the basis for transmission. Viral kinetics have revolutionized our understanding of pathogens like HIV and SARS-CoV-2, but unlike pathogen genomics (the micro-scale) and morbidity and mortality statistics (the population scale), we rarely do active surveillance on viral kinetics (the intermediate scale). We're setting out to change that: we are developing the tools to empower viral kinetics surveillance, the statistical methods to streamline data collection, and the science to interpret what we find.
Using diagnostic testing to advance public health
Diagnostic tests are normally used as clinical tools to decide the best treatment course for a patient. But diagnostic testing can play an equally powerful role in curbing outbreaks. Often, the optimal criteria for testing platforms — their sensitivity, specificity, cost, and production volume — differ depending on whether they are used for clinical or public health purposes. But our regulatory frameworks prioritize clinical uses, so potentially life-saving public health diagnostics remain poorly optimized or never make it to market. We're working to make public health testing co-equal with its clinical counterpart, using modeling and simulations to lay out public health use-cases for novel diagnostics.
Empowering local, decentralized outbreak response
Top-down decisions are often necessary for controlling outbreaks, but they risk overlooking community-specific values and risk factors, and can be too coarse and cumbersome to respond to a fast-moving outbreak. New digital technologies can empower individuals and local communities with information that was previously only accessible to well-resourced, centralized agencies, allowing for more agile and granular public health decisions. We are developing privacy-preserving, mechanistically-grounded outbreak-support tools to help local communities test targeted interventions before deploying them and to access advanced scenario-planning capabilities, powering evidence-based, community-aware interventions.
Finding the upstream drivers of antibiotic resistance
Antibiotic resistance is one of this century's foremost public health challenges. The onus to prevent it is often placed on healthcare providers, who are instructed to prescribe antibiotics only when absolutely necessary. But antibiotic use is driven more fundamentally by disease, which in turn is shaped by vaccination, underlying health conditions, and social determinants. We are working to identify these upstream drivers of antibiotic prescribing so that we can respond more comprehensively to the antibiotic resistance crisis.
Disentangling respiratory virus ecology
Respiratory viruses cause huge numbers of illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths. Their ecology dictates how we respond, including decisions like when, whom, and against which strains we should vaccinate, and how we should prepare our schools, hospitals, and workplaces for surges. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to study these viruses' ecology: by interpreting the temporal and geographic patterns of their spread as they return to normal circulation after being suppressed by masking and distancing, we can disentangle the impact of cross-immunity, waning protection, and mobility in ways that were previously impossible.
Assessing how outbreaks impact agricultural worker health and food production
Outbreaks play out differently across sectors of society. Agriculture is especially vulnerable to epidemics: agricultural workers are often highly mobile, face unique occupational exposures (pesticides, household crowding, exposure to disease-carrying vectors), and have limited access to health care. Epidemics also pose a fundamentally different type of threat to agricultural systems than better-studied shocks like droughts and storms: the response to an outbreak can exacerbate its spread, and an epidemic spreading across the globe can cause immediate, local impacts, as measures are put in place to prevent the spread of disease. We are working to understand how epidemics uniquely impact agricultural workers and food production, so that we can better anticipate and prevent their worst impacts.
Selected publications
A curated selection below — the complete, up-to-date list lives on Google Scholar. Filter by topic:
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