Beginning with my post-doctoral work at STRI, I've taken a more active interest in the evolutionary ecology of the parasites and pathogens of avian diseases. This work has been focused on two-long term, large-scale international collaborative projects. Through these projects, I've taken on collaborations that are stretching the ways that I think about birds as actors and agents of evolutionary change and ecological dynamics, and also been able to branch out into more applied science that has a human health compenent that even my parents understand!

The first project is a collaboration among several teams funded by the NIH's . Our group works on several sites spread across sub-tropical and tropical regions of four continents to collect data transmission dynamics of avian influenza. Ou goal is to build a better model of how avian influenza moves among wild birds, domestic animals and potentially into human communities. My team is currently in the field collecting samples from wild birds, and also measurig contact rates between wild birds and domestic animals. Yes, that means point counts near chicken coops!

The second project is a three way collaboration between the CDC (International Emerging Infections Program), the Gorgas Memorial Lab,, and STRI (SI-GEO) to look at the relationship between climate change, land use, and emerging diseases. We've targeted the Panama canal region as a natural laboratory for this exercise, since it combines a natural rainfall gradient between the Caribbean and Pacific coasts with a land use gradient (areas adjacent to the canal are mature secondary forest adminstered as protected areas, outside of these areas are a matrix of human-dominated landscapes (agriculture, suburban and urban). My team focuses on arbovirus dynamics: we sample the mosquito community and take serological samples from wild birds to screen for five regionally-important arboviruses. This work parallels (geographically and temporally) work on Hanta virus in small mammals and tick-borne diseases. We hope that this pilot project demonstrates another excellent use of the SI-GEO network to answer some of the most pressing questions facing the world community in the 21st century.

In addition to the collaborations listed above, this work serves as the foundation for sample collection for some really interesting work related to the parasites and pathogens of Neotropical birds. Current projects include characterizing the avian haemosporidian community (in collaboration with Matt Medeiros and Bob Ricklefs, UMSL) and the bird lice (in collaboration with Kevin Johnson, INHS) across our the diverse community of birds in the Panama Canal area.