Grants

Fellow-in-Residence Awards

Spring 2023

The Fellows-in-Residence Award is a competitive small fellowship ($5,000) for advanced Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows. We select three Fellows every semester, who are invited to participate in the Institute for up to a year, taking advantage of team resources and expertise, as well as networking and training opportunities for early career researchers.

Meet the Fellows

Dr. Touseef Ahmed

The role of heat stress in viral shedding and environmental transmission in Pteropus bat roosts in Pakistan

Project expectations

  • Projects should be co-developed with a team Investigator.

  • Projects should be able to lead to at least one peer-reviewed publication. (Publishing and open access fees will be covered by the Verena program.)

  • Projects are encouraged to have a strong modeling or experimental component that builds on existing team research projects or advances our goal of biology integration. Projects are also encouraged to take advantage of existing open source datasets, on- (e.g., VIRION) or off-team (e.g., GBIF).

  • Projects are expected to adhere to the same open science standards as other Verena projects: publications should be shared on a preprint server when submitted to a journal; all code and data should be shared; and where appropriate, data should be deposited in Verena repositories (e.g., Pharos).

  • Fellows are expected to attend team activities (e.g., monthly seminars) and are encouraged to develop additional collaborations around the team.

Preparing your proposal

Application packets should be emailed to viralemergence [at] gmail [dot] com:

  • A brief (~1 page single space) project proposal that describes methodology, expected outputs, and the proposed faculty mentor;

  • An up-to-date C.V (no page limit); and

  • Optionally: a letter of support from the trainee’s direct supervisor.

Applications for Spring 2024 are now open!
Submit your proposal by May 1, 2024 at 11:59pm ET.

Briana Betke

Anthropogenic roosting and viral richness in bats

Dr. Daniel Hartman

Diurnal temperature fluctuations and West Nile virus evolution

Fall 2023

Dr. Lambodhar Damodaran

Estimating the incidence of canine influenza viruses using compartmental and phylodynamic models

Samantha Sambado

Linking ecosystems to genes: ecological niches of tick-borne pathogens

Dr. David Simons

Ecological, geographic and molecular drivers of cross species transmission of arena- and hantaviruses

Spring 2024

Sarah Gurev

Predicting viral public epitope selective pressures from host germline antibody interactions

How to apply.

Maya Juman

Trait-based modeling of bat-paramyxovirus associations and empirical testing in museum collections

Natalie Olson

Investigating industrial logging and mining as potential drivers of zoonotic mpox spillover in the Congo Basin