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While at Tulane, I modeled several infectious diseases including mosquito-borne diseases such as Zika virus, chikungunya, dengue, and West Nile virus. I worked with dozens of researcher in an interdisciplinary setting to provide insight needed to understand, prevent, and control infectious disease spread in heterogeneous environments. Now I am a Staff Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, first in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics groups (T-6) and now in the Information Systems and Modeling group (A-1). I continue to tackle questions related to human health and infectious diseases, including statistical and mechanistic models and big data/data fusions problems.
After receiving my PhD from Tulane studying computational gas dynamics and building a new 2D model to deal with shock waves under Alexander Kurganov, I was lucky enough to post-doc at the Hyman Modeling Lab. During my tenure there, I competed in the DARPA Chikungunya challenge, contributed to the first chapter of a book about mathematically modeling emergent diseases, provided modelling assistance to understand the spread of Chlamydia in young New Orleans residents, built and published a MATLAB library to assist in examining high dimensional data using tensored 1D polynomials.
My research is in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. I use math tools to help public health researchers better understand how diseases spread and optimize the mitigation resources. Recently, I am looking into Wolbachia transmission in wild mosquitoes to control mosquito-borne diseases.
I am a mathematics, biostatistics, and public health professional who enjoys working on research teams to develop creative solutions, transforming how we analyze and view complex problems. My current interest is understanding social and geographic spread from historical outbreaks of diseases such as Ebola, SARS, and smallpox.
My research revolves around mosquitoes and mosquito-borne viruses. Even though my background is in the biology and ecology of disease transmission, I have always been interested in using mathematical tools to understand how diseases spread. Specifically, I am interested in using novel methods to quantify various disease transmission parameters with the hope to bridge biology with modeling. Currently, I hold a postdoctoral position in the Microbiology Department at the California Academy of Sciences. Other topics I’m currently working on include virus discovery, disease ecology, and education and public outreach.
I am a postbac fellow at the National Institutes of Health. I am interested in visual neuroscience, specifically comparing behavior with higher-level processing through experimental and computational methods. I graduated Tulane in 2019 with majors in mathematics and neuroscience and a public health minor. With the Mathematical Modeling and Analysis Lab, I studied the effects of diabetes on the progression and drug resistance of tuberculosis. I also previously worked on modeling vector-borne diseases with multiple risk groups and behavioral factors.