NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2013

综合现场、分子和监测数据以预测和控制野生动物人畜共患病野生动物的内源性和新出现的传染病是对生物多样性、人类健康和社会经济进步的重要威胁。野生动物疾病的管理往往受到系统复杂性高和数据稀疏的限制。将分子序列数据纳入疾病传播的机制模型，是增进对病原体持久性的理解，从而改善控制前景的最有前途的途径之一。这项研究将使用吸血蝙蝠传播的狂犬病来开发一个统计框架，将秘鲁蝙蝠群体的现场数据与家畜狂犬病暴发的时间序列和分子序列数据相结合。对病毒序列数据的分析将确定病毒在不同地区扩散的地理预测因素。来自实地调查和国家监测项目的数据将为空间显式传播模型提供信息。根据这些模型生成的传播树将与观察到的病毒系统发育进行比较，以进行参数改进和模型选择。模拟研究将探索替代扑杀或口服疫苗计划的有效性。最大限度地从不同的数据集进行生物学推断是疾病生态学的前沿，将改善对各种人畜共患疾病的管理。该项目将提供一个框架，以整合在寻求病原体持久性机理理解的研究中收集的三种类型的数据：纵向现场监测、时间序列和分子序列数据。这项研究将对吸血蝙蝠的狂犬病流行病学产生复杂的理解，吸血蝙蝠是一种疾病，每年导致数千只家畜死亡，并增加人类狂犬病死亡率。开发的工具将为整个拉丁美洲的控制计划提供信息，并构成消除病毒的第一步，同时扩大发展中国家的科学能力。

Integrating field, molecular and surveillance data to predict and control wildlife zoonosesEndemic and newly emerging infectious diseases of wildlife represent important threats to biodiversity, human health and socio-economic advancement. Management of wildlife diseases is often limited by high system complexity and sparse data. Incorporating molecular sequence data into mechanistic models of disease transmission is one of the most promising avenues to advance understanding of pathogen persistence and thereby improve prospects for control. This research will use vampire bat transmitted rabies to develop a statistical framework that integrates field data from bat colonies in Peru with time series and molecular sequence data from rabies outbreaks in livestock. Analysis of viral sequence data will identify geographic predictors of viral diffusion across landscapes. Data from field surveys and national surveillance programs will inform spatially-explicit transmission models. Transmission trees generated from these models will be compared to observed viral phylogenies for parameter refinement and model selection. Simulation studies will explore the efficacy of alternative culling or oral vaccination plans.Maximizing biological inference from diverse datasets is a frontier in disease ecology that will improve management of a variety of zoonotic diseases. This project will provide a framework to integrate three types of data that are increasingly collected in studies that seek mechanistic understanding of pathogen persistence: longitudinal field surveillance, time series and molecular sequence data. The research will generate a sophisticated understanding of rabies epidemiology in vampire bats, a disease responsible for thousands of domestic animal deaths yearly and increasing human rabies mortality. The tools developed will inform control programs throughout Latin America and constitute a first step towards viral elimination, while expanding scientific capacity in a developing country.