Incidence Prediction for the 2017-2018 Influenza Season in the United States
Xiangjun and Mercedes have published a prediction for the incidence of Infleunza inthe US for the 2017-2018 Influenza Season. The prediction is now published in PLoS Current Outbreaks. Using methodology developed in their recent paper in Science Advances, their model...
A new paper on the roles parasite play in food webs
Mercedes is a co-author on a new paper, titled "Understanding the role of parasites in food webs using the group model". The first authors are two PhD students from Stefano Allesina's lab. See the paper here.
Lab party at Qixin’s
Last Saturday we all gathered at Qixin's place for an end-of-the-year party. It was also an opportunity to say good bye to those who are leaving us: Pamela who will start her postdoc in Harvard, Ruby who is going to India for field work and Xianjun who will start his...
Our new paper in Science Translational Medicine on forecasting seasonal flu
A new paper, a result of work led by Xiangjun Du, uses evolutionary information to try to forecast upcoming H3N2 seasons in advance using genetic sequences. After developing the model, we used it to predict that H3N2 in the pending 2016/2017 season will be at a higher...
Congratulations Pamela for the PhD defense!
Our beloved Pamela is now officially a PhD! Pamela gave a wonderful talk to the department and passed her defense without any probelm 🙂 Pamenla will continue to a postdoc postion in Harvard Medical School with Prof. Marc Lipsitch. We will of course be very sad to see...
Our new paper on the non-neutral processes shaping the strain structure of falciparum malaria is on bioRxive!
In this paper we present theory to identify signatures of immune selection using networks of genetic similarity that reveal non-neutral structures of var gene strains in an extensively sampled population in Bongo District (BD), Ghana. This work was done in...
Dr. David Alonso is visiting our lab
Dr. David Alonso is a Ramon y Cajal researcher in The Blanes Centre for Advanced Studies, in Spain. He is now visiting our lab as a Tinker Fellow of the University of Chicago and will give a course about stochastic processes in ecology. Welcome!
A new paper revealing evidence for strain structure in Plasmodium falciparum var gene repertoires
A new paper just came out in PNAS with our collaborators in the University of Melbourne. This paper aims to discover how diverse malaria parasites are in children from an African village. Using DNA sequencing of var genes, we show that they are highly diverse such...
Shai’s Paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution
Congratulations to Shai for his perspective paper on Multilayer Networks in Ecology published in Nature Ecology and Evolution today. Ecological systems are complex and multifaceted. For example, species interact in diverse ways with multiple partners, and ecological...
Mauricio’s paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution
Congratulations to Mauricio (and Andres Baeza now at ASU) for their paper also in Nature Ecology and Evolution on land-use change, economics and malaria in frontier regions, which was published today.
Meeting at the UCDelhi Center
Mercedes and Mauricio went to Delhi for a great meeting at the UCDelhi Center on Cities, Climate Forcing and Infectious Diseases. Thank you for all the support of the Center and to participants from India and other parts of the world.
David Alonso nominated a Tinker Fellow
The Center for Latin American Studies has nominated David Alonso (CSIC, Catalunya) as a Tinker Fellow. David will be spending the fall here at UC working on the transmission dynamics of mosquito-borne infections, and on stochastic theory for patterns of species’...
Pamela’s paper accepted to PLoS One
Bravo Pamela for the paper on prediction of cholera cases in Dhaka with the 2015-16 El Niño now in press in PloS One. We learnt from the lack of an epidemic that local environmental conditions linking this global climate driver to disease spread are changing...
Support from the Center for Latin American Studies
The Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at UC has awarded us support for a working group here at the university with colleagues from Rio de Janeiro working on dengue in the city. Claudia Codeço, Oswaldo Cruz (FioCruz) and Flavio Coelho (Institute G. Vargas) will...
Meeting on The Impact of Environmental Changes on Infectious Diseases (IECID)
Mercedes is co-organizing the second international meeting on The Impact of Environmental Changes on Infectious Diseases (IECID), this time at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP, Trieste), which should be as interesting and fun as the previous one...
Received support from the France and Chicago Collaborating in the Sciences
We have received support from FACCTS (France and Chicago Collaborating in the Sciences) as seed funding to explore joint work with colleagues Olivier Telle (CNRS, University of Paris-Sorbonne) and Richard Paul (Pasteur Institute), on ‘Harnessing space and time in the...