Our group uses computational approaches to understand the impacts of global environmental change on human health and infectious disease, with a strong grounding in ecological theory. Some of our ongoing areas of work include:

Geoengineering and global health security

Emergency climate interventions like solar radiation management are increasingly being discussed as a short-term option to buffer some of the most serious impacts of climate change. While geoengineering could plausibly save millions of lives, a world with both climate change and geoengineering isn’t the same as a world without climate change—creating new governance problems and raising red flags about unmeasured risks. Ours is the only lab with a major ongoing project investigating the impacts of solar geoengineering and other emerging technologies on the global burden of infectious diseases.

Previous work was supported by the DECIMALS program (now the DEGREES Initiative) in partnership with icddr,b in Dhaka, Bangladesh and the Climate Risk Lab at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Selected publications:

• Nature Communications - “Solar geoengineering could redistribute malaria risk in developing countries”; The Atlantic coverage

• Nature Climate Change commentary - “Climate engineering needs a clean bill of health”

Predicting viral emergence and preventing pandemics

Our lab is the home of Verena, a cross-university NSF Biology Integration Institute working to understand how molecular mechanisms explain disease emergence dynamics at the planetary scale. Our group uses data science and machine learning to understand the rules that govern host-virus compatibility, and predict how climate change could reshape that interaction network, with a focus on viruses with bat reservoirs or mosquito vectors. In the long-term, our goal is to understand the anthropogenic fingerprint on viral emergence, predict the identity of future threats, and develop partnerships for surveillance, early detection, and biomedical countermeasures.

Selected publications:

• Nature - “Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk” - plus check out Ed Yong’s essay in The Atlantic

• Nature Microbiology - “The science of the host-virus network”

• The Lancet Microbe - “Optimising predictive models to prioritise viral discovery in zoonotic reservoirs”; The New York Times coverage

The global climate change-attributable burden of infectious diseases

Our current area of focus is the detection of climate change impacts in recent and real-time trends related to infectious disease burden in animals and humans. Ongoing work focuses on applying formal detection and attribution methods to the dynamics of malaria (Plasmodium falciparum) in Africa. We’ve also proposed a Global Burden of Climate Change Study to establish the transnational datasets and partnerships needed to answer these questions at scale.

Selected publications:

• medRxiv - “The historical fingerprint and future impact of climate change on childhood malaria in Africa”

• Global Change Biology - “Plague risk in the western United States over seven decades of environmental change”

• PLOS Climate commentary - “The health burden of climate change: a call for global scientific action”

Policy solutions for planetary health

We often work directly on problems at the science-policy interface, from climate adaptation strategies to outbreak response. Currently, the Carnegie Endowment sponsored Pandemic Treaty Project is documenting treaty negotiations and advocating for an evidence-based approach to prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Selected publications:

• Science - “A treaty to break the pandemic cycle”

• The Lancet - “International law reform for One Health notifications”

Plus, some previous areas of work
(which could be future areas if someone is interested!)

The global biodiversity of symbiotic networks

Most parasite species, and most virus species, are undescribed. Our work has explored the drivers of parasites, pathogens, and symbionts diversity, and how to measure their diversity despite data gaps, including the mathematical mystery of “power law-like” scaling in bipartite subnetworks.

Selected publications:

• Proceedings of the Royal Society B - “What would it take to describe the global diversity of parasites?”; The Guardian coverage

• Nature Ecology and Evolution - “Global estimates of mammalian viral diversity accounting for host sharing”

Parasite conservation

Parasite biodiversity might account for the majority of life on Earth, and play critical roles in ecosystem function and nutrient cycling, but they remain some of the most neglected species in conservation. With several teams over the years, we’ve worked to revive a thriving subdiscipline of invertebrate conservation, natural history, and disease ecology.

Selected publications:

• Science Advances - “Parasite biodiversity faces extinction and redistribution in a changing climate”; The New York Times coverage

• Biological Conservation - “A global parasite conservation plan” - plus a special issue of the journal

Medical geography of infectious disease

We use machine learning to develop risk maps for socioenvironmental drivers of infectious diseases. In previous projects, our group produced the first global maps of anthrax (Bacillus anthracis) and Zika virus. Ongoing projects include developing the first global map of plague (Yersinia pestis) in partnership with Boris Schmid. Recent focus areas include better datasets for countermeasures, data development for mapping neglected infections like helminthiases, and new approaches to causal inference with spatial datasets.

Selected publications:

• Nature Microbiology - “The global distribution of Bacillus anthracis and associated anthrax risk to humans, livestock and wildlife”; NPR coverage

• Parasitology - “Spatial parasitology and the unmapped human helminthiases”

• Methods in Ecology & Evolution - “embarcadero: Species distribution modelling with Bayesian additive regression trees in R”