Lighthouse Lightning Talks are 10-minute seminars from world experts in virology, immunology, ecology, evolution, computer science, and global health—sharing their cutting-edge work, in their own words.
2024
Juliana Taube
March 1, 2024
We know that characterizing the diversity of a field is a first step in making research more inclusive and equitable. So, how does the field of infectious disease dynamics stack up when Juliana Taube and Alexes Merritt look at gender and race/ethnicity?
Mark Wilber
March 1, 2024
Disease ecologists often rely on prevalence data to inform conclusions about which members of an environment are maintenance species for a given pathogen. Mark Wilber explains why this may be misleading and what other parameters should be taken into account.
2023
Louise Moncla
November 1, 2024
The ongoing Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) outbreak has been spreading more quickly and spilling over into more non-avian animals than past outbreaks. How can we harness the information stored in the HPAI genome to understand how this outbreak has unfolded over time and what makes it so different?
Michael Baym
November 1, 2024
Evolution is a central characteristic for all microbes. For bacteria, plasmids offer a particularly unique opportunity to harness the power of rapid evolution for purposes like antibiotic resistance and gene expression - but how, and at what cost?
Lambodhar Damodaran
October 4, 2024
Fellow in Residence Lambodhar Damodaran utilizes canine influenza virus as a case study to explore the challenges around characterizing a comprehensive epidemiology for certain viral pathogens that lack a perceived zoonotic risk or commercial concern.
Sam Sambado
October 4, 2024
Often, public health responses are determined by the number of reported cases, but what happens when the scale of those numbers are biased? There are still significant gaps in our knowledge of the epidemiology and ecology of ticks and their viruses, and Fellow in Residence Sam Sambado is working to address some of those holes.
David Simons
October 4, 2024
Drawing meaningful conclusions about pathogen prevalence, sampling bias, host range, and more is impossible without high quality datasets to work from. Fellow in Residence Dr. Simons discusses the challenging process of creating such a dataset and exploring some of these topics for Arena- and Hantaviruses.
Paul Turner
September 6, 2024
With the increasingly urgent crisis of antibiotic resistance already impacting our lives, can phage therapy offer cutting edge clinical solutions? Dr. Turner is harnessing the principles of evolutionary biology to increase our understanding of phage-bacteria dynamics and develop treatments for antibiotic resistant infections.
Nia Toshkova
August 2, 2024
Bats are constantly exposed to a wide range of temperatures as part of their physiology, behaviors, and environment. We know little about how these temperature fluctuations impact bat adaptive immunity and antibody function, but Dr. Toshkova is working to change that.
Asher Leeks
August 2, 2024
We don’t often think of viruses as having social interactions, but Dr. Leeks shows how viral “cheats” can take advantage of shared resources and impact infection dynamics. Can we then use that information to understand other infection characteristics like zoonosis, transmission, or evolution?
Maimuna Majumder
August 2, 2024
Medical misinformation poses a significant risk to public health. Dr. Majumder presents a case study of a highly publicized misinformation event, which had a staggering impact on the health information seeking behaviors of the U.S. public.
Aude Bernheim
June 7, 2024
What can Viperins tell us about antiviral immunity across domains of life? Dr. Bernheim explores how sequence and structure conservation in Viperin genes can shed light on the evolution of immunity in eukaryotes.
Chelsea Wood
May 3, 2024
Ecologists are really good at tracking biodiversity changes, except when it comes to parasites, which constitute significant biomass and exert marked impact on their environments. Can museum collections offer answers to the mystery of how parasite populations have been changing over time?
Lily Xu
May 3, 2024
Current AI tools are still insufficient to help us tackle some of the world’s biggest conservation and maternal health issues. Dr. Xu takes an immersive approach to learning about these problems from the communities most impacted in order to inform her work developing the AI and computational tools to solve them.
Irene Salinas
April 5, 2024
What do fish have to teach us about evolutionary immunology? Dr. Salinas and her team are using cutting edge techniques to challenge long-held assumptions about the organization and function of immune structures in fish with implications for our broader understanding of immune systems and response to infection.
Clara Rehmann
February 2, 2024
Machine learning can reconstruct where a malaria genome sequence originated. When it guesses wrong, can that be a clue to how and where malaria and mosquitoes have coevolved?
Sabrina McNew
January 5, 2024
Human presence and the related environmental changes are fairly new to the Galapagos Islands (<500 years), providing a unique opportunity to study the impacts on the islands’ ecology. What can the transcriptomic response to avian pox infection in Darwin’s finches tell us about the evolution of disease resistance?
Amandine Gamble
January 5, 2024
What can remote, sub-antarctic oceanic islands tell us about the ecology of multi-host pathogens? Dr. Gamble shows us the example of avian cholera and seabirds, while making the case that we need more than mass vaccination to save many of the impacted species.
Gemma Turon
December 1, 2023
Communicable diseases disproportionately impact low- and middle-income countries, yet they produce only ~5% of the world’s science and engineering research. Ersilia is a small-but-mighty non-profit working to bridge that gap using open-source data and AI to give power to the communities most affected by infectious diseases.
María José Tolsá-García
December 1, 2023
Infectious diseases are incredibly complex and impact every aspect of our lives. To get at these complexities, Dr. Tolsá-García takes a macroecological approach to studying arboviral disease dynamics in birds in order to better understand host susceptibility, transmission dynamics, and reservoir competence.
Vineet Menachery
December 1, 2023
COVID-19 was not the first infectious disease outbreak to have a significant global impact, and it won’t be the last. How can we best prepare for the next emerging virus? The Menachery lab utilizes a reverse genetics approach to dive into the molecular virology to give insights into the key traits that indicate risk and can inform future interventions.
Freya Jephcott
November 3, 2023
When an entire outbreak investigation points towards a forest, some monkeys, and zoonotic origin, what do we do when all that turns out to be wrong? What led the team to their conclusions, and what could be done differently?
Jonathon Mifsud
November 3, 2023
The diversity of plant viruses has remained largely unexplored. In one of the first studies of its kind, we learn plants are harboring many more viruses than we suspected, and that secondary data analysis powered by open data is critical to understanding the dynamics between them.
Kaylee Arnold
October 6, 2023
Deforestation associated land-use changes, infection with T. cruzi, and the gut microbiome diversity of Kissing Bugs (R. pallescens) are all interconnected. What can this teach us about Chagas disease, which infects 8-15 million people?
Jude Kong
October 6, 2023
Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for outbreak preparedness and response, and it is critical that these solutions are developed by diverse groups, in partnership with the communities most impacted, and with buy-in from decision- and policymakers. “Never create an AI solution for the community without the community.”
Michael Catchen
March 31, 2023
Ecological networks scale faster than ecological data. Can understanding the false negative rate help us make better predictions? (And: when will datasets be big enough for better graph ML models?)
Verity Hill
October 6, 2023
Mapping the seasonal spread of EEEV allows for the identification of factors that may have contributed to a spike in cases in 2019. Are mosquitoes the key and can they help us predict future outbreaks?
Briana Betke
September 1st, 2023
Studying where and how bats roost can tell us quite a bit about transmission risk for zoonotic spillover and can also inform conservation efforts. Indeed, roosting near people does not appear to be a strong driver of zoonotic potential.
Touseef Ahmed
September 1st, 2023
Heat stress drives behavior changes and physiological adaptations in Flying Foxes. What impact do these changes have on zoonotic disease emergence dynamics?
Heather Koehler
March 31, 2023
When viruses and hosts fight to control cell death, who wins? Experiments with ZBP1-knockout mice and poxviruses point to broader lessons about necroptosis.
