People.
Prospective Postdocs
For prospective postdoctoral researchers with an interest in working with me at the University of Minnesota, please send a note detailing your research interests along with a CV to my email. Because we do not consistently have funding for wildlife-related projects, one option is to develop a research proposal of mutual interest for external fellowship funding. Please contact me well in advance of fellowship deadlines to discuss potential projects. Opportunities are more readily available for livestock research, so please contact me to discuss current opportunties.
Post-docs
Elizabeth Miller
Ph.D. Biology, University of Notre Dame
B.A. Biology and Classical Civilizations, Oberlin College
Liz's research focuses on the epidemiology of bacterial antimicrobial resistance at the wildlife-livestock interface. Her current research projects include 1) using metagenomic sequencing to understand the role anthropogenic sources may play in the dissemination of antimicrobial resistance genes wild raptors and 2) assessing the role giraffe social behavior plays in the acquisition and maintenance of resistant commensal E. coli. Other research interests include animal behavior, the microbiome, and wildlife disease ecology.
Igor Paploski
DrPH, Universidade Federal da Bahia
MSc, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz
DVM, Universidade Federal do Paraná
Igor is interested in epidemiology of infectious diseases, both in humans and animals. He has experience with the epidemiology of human leptospirosis and arboviral circulation in an urban setting of a developing country. His current research projects include 1) the forecast of PRRS/PED occurrence in American swine farms and 2) finding epidemiological patterns of the occurrence of similar co-circulating strains of PRRS in the US.
Doctoral students
Anna Munsey
PhD student, Comparative and Molecular Biosciences
DVM, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2014)
BA, Biology, University of Virginia (2009)
Anna is interested in the epidemiology of infectious diseases of livestock, primarily diseases which disproportionately affect developing countries. Her current research is focused on exploring the epidemiology of foot and mouth disease among cattle in Uganda using regression, machine learning, and phylogenetic methods.
Umanga Gunasekera
PhD student, Veterinary Medicine
M.Sc., Veterinary Public Health, Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany & Chiangmai University, Thailand
B.V.Sc., University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
Umanga's research interests revolve around characterizing challenges and elucidating the epidemiology o foot-and-mouth disease in endemic settings in Asia, including identifying risk factors, employing participatory epidemiological approaches, and possibly modeling the spread of the disease.
Masters students
Rahul Kumar Bhojwani
Masters student, Data Science
B.Tech in Computer Science, National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India
As a Graduate Research assistant, Rahul is working on predicting the outbreak of PRRS and PED virus in sow farms. He works with our team to formulate prediction questions as a spatiotemporal network node classification problem where spatial environmental factors and the movements of herds between farms are used to predict outbreaks. Before pursuing his masters, Rahul holds some work experience in the startup industry culture. His area of work includes Deep Learning, Machine Learning, SpatioTemporal Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence. His hobbies include playing badminton, Theatre acting, Beatboxing and riding his motorcycle.
Belinda Befort
Masters student, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Belinda's research focuses on using novel data streams for biosurveillance. She analyzes aggregated time series data of diagnostic testing data from the University of Minnesota Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory to assess seasonal and long-term trends, correlating these with clinical data to assess their utility as a surveillance tool.