Current lab members
Erin Mordecai
Erin Mordecai is an associate professor in Biology, Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment, Faculty Fellow in the Center for Innovation in Global Health and the King Center, and member of Bio-X. She completed her PhD in 2012 at UC Santa Barbara, followed by an NSF Mathematical Biology postdoc at UNC Chapel Hill and NC State University. She studies the ecology of infectious diseases in plants, animals, and humans.
Aly Singleton
Aly is a PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment & Resources, co-advised by Prof. Stephen Luby (Department of Medicine - Infectious Diseases). She received her undergraduate (Applied Mathematics) and master's (Biostatistics) degrees from Brown University, where she worked at the People, Place & Health Collective of the Brown University School of Public Health. She then completed a Data Science Fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now at Stanford, Aly uses tools in computation and network science to study the effect of anthropogenic change on underlying transmission networks in an effort to prevent widening disease disparities and to address socio-ecological drivers of disease distribution.
Emma Krasovich
Emma joined the Mordecai lab as a PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2022. She is a Stanford Data Science Scholar. She is interested in measuring how large-scale environmental change impacts human health, particularly in indigenous and other vulnerable communities. She hopes to combine ML, satellite imagery, econometrics, epidemiology, and disease ecology to inform environmental and health policy. She is a NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Stanford EDGE Fellow.
Isabel Delwel
Isabel is a PhD student in the Microbiology and Immunology Department. She received her bachelor’s degree in Biology (Chemistry minor) at the University of North Texas. She then worked at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine studying molecular mechanisms behind viral infection. At Stanford, Isabel is interested in the intersection of molecular virology, evolutionary biology, and infectious disease dynamics. Her PhD work is developing a fruit fly - virus model system for understanding how within-host virus evolution affects epidemic dynamics through host populations.
delwel@stanford.edu
Kelsey Lyberger
Kelsey is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology. Broadly, she is interested in species’ ecological and evolutionary responses to environmental change. Currently her focus is on understanding mosquito-parasite interactions across a climate gradient, and on quantifying a global relationship between temperature and dengue. She received her PhD in 2021 from UC Davis where she developed experiments and models of eco-evolutionary dynamics.
Amelia Meyer
Amelia is a Research Scientist for Disease Ecology in a Changing World. Her research is focused on applied solutions to prevent the spread of infectious diseases and support nature, frontline communities, planetary health, and climate change mitigation. She is a creative and committed Environmental Scientist who most recently worked on nature metrics for WWF. She will bring systems thinking to formulate innovative and tactical ecological solutions, connect dots across global and local scales, and build interdisciplinary relationships for planetary health.
Desire Uwera Nalukwago
Desire is a Biology PhD student and HAI fellow in the Mordecai lab. She received her undergraduate degree in Neuroscience and French from Lake Forest College in Illinois. She is interested in the transmission and control of vector-borne diseases with environmental changes, and previously worked on life-history trade-offs in the Barbosa lab. She cares about public health, community education and access to quality health care especially for women and children in LMICs as well as hard-to-reach groups.
Johannah Farner
Johannah is an ecology and evolution PhD student in the lab. She is interested in how global change affects the ecology and evolution of species interactions. Her dissertation research centers on interactions between the western tree hole mosquito (Aedes sierrensis), its facultative ciliate parasite (Lambornella clarki), and climate.
jfarner@stanford.edu
Eloise Skinner
Eloise is a senior scientist in the Mordecai lab. She is broadly interested in the transmission dynamics of zoonotic and vector-borne pathogens in a changing climate. Despite being focussed on disease ecology outcomes, her work sits at the interface of public health, veterinary science and environmental change biology. Currently her research is focussed on climate change and vector-borne diseases in the Australasia-Pacific region, and developing tools for public health decision making.
ebskinn@stanford.edu
Víctor Peña-García
Víctor is a postdoctoral fellow in Mordecai Lab along with Desiree LaBeaud and Jason Andrews’s Labs (School of Medicine). Early in his career, Víctor was interested in the study of vector-borne pathogen transmission at biological and epidemiological levels. Later, Víctor focused on the study of arbovirus transmission and its relationship with temperature. He is enthusiastic about working at the conjunction of biology, statistics, and epidemiology.
Jasmine Childress
Jasmine is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology. She is interested in how parasites interact with and structure ecological communities. Her work applies traditional parasitology, DNA metabarcoding, and mathematical and statistical modeling approaches to understand the socio-ecological drivers of infectious disease and their ecosystem consequences. She received her PhD in 2023 from UC Santa Barbara, where her work investigated parasites in Channel Island foxes, among other conservation-relevant species.
jchild@stanford.edu
Rachel Fay
Rachel is a postdoc in the Mordecai lab interested in the vector-borne diseases and climate change. Her PhD research focused on the influence of temperature on West Nile virus evolution and vector-virus interactions. She now studies the genetic determinants of mosquito thermal tolerance.
Mallory Harris
Mallory is a Biology PhD student in the Mordecai Lab. She received her undergraduate degrees in Math and Computational Biology from the University of Georgia, where she conducted research in the Drake Lab on forecasting vector-borne diseases. She is a Goldwater Scholar and Knight-Hennessy Scholar. She is interested in the effects of environmental change on disease dynamics, using models to inform health policy, and the spread and impact of misinformation.
mharris9@stanford.edu
Caroline Glidden
Caroline is a senior scientist and HAI Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mordecai Lab interested in ecology of wildlife and human diseases, global change biology, and biodiversity conservation. Her PhD research focused on drivers of parasite and pathogen assemblages in African buffalo. Caroline now studies the eco-epidemiology of leishmaniasis, and the effect of land-use change on vector-borne and zoonotic disease dynamics.
cglidden@stanford.edu
Mauricio Cruz-Loya
Mauricio is a postdoctoral fellow in the Mordecai lab. He received his PhD in Biomathematics from UCLA, where he studied the combined effects of antibiotics and extreme temperature in bacteria. Before becoming a mathematical biologist, he started as a wet-lab biologist, receiving a BS in Biomedical Research from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Mauricio is interested in understanding the effects of environmental stressors in the population growth and other life-history traits of living organisms, and in linking experimental information at the molecular and cellular level to biological processes at the organism, population and community levels. His current focus is modeling the effects of temperature and other environmental stressors in the transmission of vector-borne infectious diseases.
mauricio.cruz.loya@gmail.com
Váleri Vásquez
Váleri is a Biotechnology Innovation and International Security Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mordecai Lab whose interests lie in disease ecology, environmental change, and decision theory. Her research develops mathematical frameworks and scientific software to render public health management more efficient, equitable, and robust to environmental uncertainty. Váleri received her PhD and MS degrees from UC Berkeley.
vasquezv@stanford.edu
https://vnvasquez.github.io/
Daniela de Angeli Dutra
Daniela is a disease ecologist whose research focuses on the drivers of parasite community structure, parasite dispersal, and the impacts of global change on parasite transmission/spread. Her research goal is to better understand the patterns and mechanisms that contribute to parasite emergence and the possible ways to mitigate pathogen impact. Currently, she is investigating the effect of global change on malaria parasites in South America. Ultimately, her research should help to improve models to predict, prevent, or mitigate disease outbreaks and human burden.
alumni lab members
Lisa Couper
Lisa joined the Mordecai lab as an Eco/Evo PhD student in 2018. She received her undergraduate degree in Environmental Science at the UNC-Chapel Hill and masters degree in Biology at San Francisco State University. Her prior research has focused on the microbial ecology of Lyme disease and the effects of climate change on tick-borne disease incidence. She now studies patterns of thermal tolerance in vector populations and the effects of vector adaptation on disease transmission under climate change.
lisabelcouper@gmail.com
MARTA SHOCKET
Marta joined the Mordecai Lab as a postdoc in 2016 after completing her PhD at Indiana University with Spencer Hall. She is currently a postdoc at UCLA. She’s primarily interested in the seasonality and environmental regulation of infectious diseases. Other interests include eco-evolutionary dynamics of host resistance, how within-host processes scale up to patterns at the population level, and community ecology approaches to disease. In the Mordecai lab, Marta studies how temperature impacts the transmission of mosquito- and fly-vectored diseases. Her PhD work investigated how temperature and food resources influence a freshwater zooplankton-fungus disease system using field observations, experiments, and mathematical models.
marta.shocket@gmail.com
CAROLINE DAWS
Caroline is the former lab technician and received her PhD in the Biology Department at Stanford. She received her BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is interested in how plant-fungal interactions drive ecosystem function.
Morgan Kain
Morgan is a senior scientist at EcoHealth Alliance. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Erin Mordecai (Biology) and Lisa Mandle (Natural Capital Project). He received his PhD in 2019 from McMaster University with Ben Bolker and Jonathan Dushoff. He is broadly interested in the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases of both human and wildlife populations. Morgan is interested in understanding how changing land-use affects the transmission of infectious diseases of humans (e.g. dengue and malaria), though he continues to study diseases that affect both humans and wildlife (Ross River virus transmission in Australia). He is passionate about reproducibility in science and clean and clear statistical analyses and continues to work to improve statistical practice and the communication of statistical results in science.
morganpkain@gmail.com
Devin Kirk
Devin is a quantitative ecologist broadly interested in how environmental stressors, especially those related to anthropogenic change, impact host-parasite interactions. The majority of his research focuses on developing a better mechanistic framework for predicting how climate change will alter infectious disease at both the individual and population levels. His work is typically an iterative process of mathematical modeling and conducting ecological experiments, where he generates data to parameterize models across environmental factors, make predictions, and then test key ecological theory by confronting the predictions with data.
Jamie CaldwelL
Jamie is an Associate Research Scholar at the High Meadows Institute at Princeton University. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford investigating climate drivers of mosquito-borne diseases with Erin Mordecai, Desiree LaBeaud, and Eric Lambin. Jamie is interested in the ecology and spatial dynamics of infectious diseases in humans and marine and terrestrial wildlife. She received her PhD in 2017 from the University Hawai‘i at Mānoa in zoology and marine biology where she studied infectious disease dynamics in coral reefs. She continues to study coral diseases as part of a NASA Ecological Forecasting project with the University of Hawai‘i, James Cook University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
jc6991@princeton.edu
Lawrence Uricchio
Lawrence is an Assistant Professor at Tufts University. He was an NIH IRACDA postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and is currently postdoc at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in bioinformatics from UCSF in 2014. He studies competitive processes within and between species using both mathematical models and empirical data, and is interested in how evolutionary forces shape genetic and phenotypic diversity.
lawrence.uricchio@tufts.edu | https://uricchio.github.io/
Marissa Childs
Marissa is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She received her PhD in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2022. She joined the Mordecai Lab in 2016 and was co-advised by Marshall Burke (Department of Earth System Science). She's interested in how environmental conditions affect human health and well-being. Her research has focused on yellow fever virus spillover from non-human primates into human populations in Brazil, effects of gold mining on malaria transmission in the Amazon, effects of climate warming on dengue burden, effects of wildfire smoke pollution on human health, and dynamics of COVID-19.
mchilds@fas.harvard.edu | marissachilds.com
ANDY MACDONALD
Andy MacDonald is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. He was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology and Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mordecai lab. He completed his PhD in ecology, evolution and marine biology in 2016 at UC Santa Barbara with Cherie Briggs. His interests are in vector-borne disease ecology and environmental change. He studies tick-borne disease systems in North America and mosquito-borne disease in Latin America.
macdonald@eri.ucsb.edu | https://andrewjmacdonald.weebly.com/
MEGHAN HOWARD
Meghan received an M.S. in the Stanford Biology Department. Meghan earned her undergraduate degree in Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. She has worked as a research technician for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ Ornithology Unit, the Reiskind Vector Ecology Lab at NCSU, and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s Neighborhood Nestwatch Program.
meghanhe@gmail.com
Sindiso Nyathi
Sindiso is a PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health. He received his undergraduate degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2016. His research interests include Global Health, Infectious Disease modeling and Health Policy in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). Sindiso is passionate about working to leverage the range of mathematical and computational tools available today to improve public health and combat disease in LMICs.
Nicole Nova
Nicole is postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. She received her PhD in Biology in the Mordecai and Petrov Labs in 2022. She received her undergraduate and graduate training in dental surgery at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. She also studied electrical engineering for a year at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. She then spent a year at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center working on mathematical modeling of cancer evolution in the Michor Lab. Then, she worked on eco-evolutionary dynamics of infectious disease (i.e., within-host modeling of HIV and antibody co-evolution) in the Koelle Research Group at Duke. Nicole is interested in the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases in wildlife, rapid adaptation, population genetics, conservation genomics, and large carnivore conservation.
nnova@stanford.edu | http://nicolenova.com/