Profile

I grew up on a farm and wanted to be a cow vet, but when I got into vet school I learned about epidemiology and fell in love. Even then, I planned to work mostly with cow diseases, but I’ve been pulled into human health work through the concept of One Health, which says that human, animal, and environmental health is linked. Now I don’t ever want to go back to just one species, just one type of health research. I love that I get to work with so many amazing people – engineers, microbiologists, anthropologists, and programmers.

I have 2 small kids (3rd grade and preschool), so I spend a lot of my time just being a mom. Our family loves to have dance parties and to make fart jokes!

I work on a lot of diseases. For instance, I study West Nile Virus, which is carried by mosquitoes. We work with mosquito control organizations to predict where people are at risk so they can take action (spraying for mosquitoes, or just letting people know to be careful). I also study diseases that are carried by ticks, so my team go out looking for ticks so we know where they are, when they are there, and what diseases they are carrying. We then try to predict where people need to be especially careful about ticks. I’ve also done a lot of work around COVID-19, especially what tests should we use when and how we should protect ourselves, our schools, and our communities.

My work is almost entirely on the computer! I spend a lot of time reading and writing, because that is how scientists learn from each other. I also spend a lot of time programming, which is my actual research. Most often, though, I spend time in meetings. I work with a lot of students doing their own research, and we meet every week to talk about what they are doing and to solve problems they find.

My team loves to teach people about mosquitoes and ticks, and the diseases they carry! We teach all sorts of adults about them, but we’ve never done a class for kids. We would love to hire some teachers to help us design a workshop to teach kids about these topics. Our area has a program called Cena y Ciencia, that does science workshops in Spanish for kids, so we would also want to translate the workshop into Spanish.