Dr. Micaela Martinez is an infectious disease ecologist. Her primary focus is understanding the drivers that shape seasonality in infectious disease systems, with particular interest in the impact of biological rhythms (i.e., circadian and circannual rhythms) on disease. Her current projects aim to inform vaccination policy by revealing how demographic, physiological, and environmental factors intersect in epidemic-prone disease systems, including poliomyelitis, measles, and chickenpox. Dr. Martinez also conducts research on maternal immunity in infants and is building a statistical inference pipeline for studying vaccine modes of action. She utilizes cutting-edge statistical inference techniques and mathematical models to couple disease incidence data with clinical data to gain insight into the transmission dynamics of disease.
Kevin M. Bakker is an NIH research fellow with a broad interest in the spatiotemporal population dynamics of infectious diseases, with a particular focus on immunization and mitigation strategies. His primary research examines the potential impact of a vampire bat rabies vaccine on the dynamics and prevalence of rabies in Latin America, in collaboration with Daniel Streicker. Kevin is also involved in multiple other projects, including analyzing the seasonality of historical childhood disease epidemics in the U.S., exploring the mechanisms driving these patterns, investigating interactions between pathogens with overlapping seasonality, conducting a global meta-analysis of infectious disease seasonality across 98 countries during the 21st century, and translating historical survey data into demographic models for studying human disease transmission. His team, including a lab manager and three UROP students, actively contributes to these initiatives.
