On the road

Human movement into natural areas increases contact with wild animals, arthropods and their pathogens. I look for sustainable solutions to keep healthy people, healthy animals in a healthy environment.

I am working at the wildlife-human interface, where I am trying to understand the interactions between wildlife (arthropods included), domestic animals and humans to: better understand disease transmission and find ways to limit pathogen spread.

In other words, as a disease ecologist, I think about dynamics of zoonotic vector-borne diseases to discover integrated disease management approaches in a One Health framework by utilizing fieldwork, bench-science, citizen science and modeling approaches bridging ecology, social sciences and public health / epidemiology.

Reducing tick-borne disease is the ultimate goal and human behavior is an important missing component in our understanding of tick-borne diseases. In addition, education tools have been poorly evaluated and public health messaging (used to) omit ticks in the yard.

Upon starting my postdoc, I became project lead for the Tick App project at UW-Madison, developed undergraduate research projects to assess tick prevention (tools) at summer camps and assessed tick density in Wisconsin backyards in 2018. The latter evolved in to a backyard control study in two neighborhoods in 2019 and unfortunately these efforts seized in 2020 due to COVID-19.

Mosquito project