about me
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I'm a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University, where I am funded by the Intelligence Community to work with Ellen Ketterson and Richard Hall on modeling how changes in animal migration (e.g., from urbanization and supplemental feeding) affect infectious disease dynamics. I recently completed postdoctoral research at Montana State University with Raina Plowright on bat virus dynamics and spillover and received my PhD in 2017 from the University of Georgia with Sonia Altizer and Daniel Streicker on the interplay between anthropogenic resources and wildlife disease.
I'm broadly interested in the ecology and evolution of infectious disease. My work combines theory, field studies, and data synthesis to examine how the environment, animal movement, and species traits shape host–pathogen interactions and spillover risks. How does land conversion affect pathogen transmission? Does animal migration fuel epidemics? How do species vary in their susceptibility to zoonoses? Much of this work focuses on bats and birds. I maintain a longitudinal study of vampire bat diet and infection dynamics in Belize (with the AMNH) and collaborate on a large NSF- and DARPA-funded project on immunology and bacterial infection in urbanized flying foxes. More recently, I also study immunology and tick-borne diseases of songbirds in the Midwest. My work is funded by the Intelligence Community, National Geographic, Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. Please feel free to get in touch for potential collaborations on theoretical ecology, immunology of natural populations, meta-analyses and comparative methods, and field studies of infections in wild birds or bats. I am also interested in mentoring students and conducting workshops on these topics. |
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contact information
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Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Biology Indiana University |
149 Jordan Hall
Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 |
© Daniel J. Becker, 2019. All rights reserved.
