New work in progress on primate reservoirs of arboviruses - when do they actually matter for transmission? and where will climate change take them - on display at the Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases Symposium last Friday!

A long-term dream of mine has been to bridge @viralemergence.org's work on AI/ML-driven viral risk assessment with AI/ML-driven work on drug discovery. This would make a great topic for this fellowship here at Yale! If you're interested in applying, reach out. medicine.yale.edu/biomedical-d...

We're looking for a full-stack developer! Help us build the best open data platforms for pandemic prediction in the world. Probably a short-term contract, but if you're looking for a full-time gig, let's talk. Inquire within: www.viralemergence.org/blog/were-hi...

Exciting news to start 2026: for the first time ever, the PHAROS repository for wildlife disease surveillance is a journal-recommended home for your archived data! Thanks to Integrative and Comparative Biology for taking the leap with us 🦠🔢➡️🌎💻💫 academic.oup.com/icb/pages/Ge...

NEW!🦠🌡️ : What makes a "dengue year" like 2023-24? It's hard to pin down an answer unless you can homogenize out all the spatial variation and temporal trends. But once you do, the answer is pretty clean: dengue years are hot years. Last one of the year (unless...?) 👉 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 We're about to start reviewing applications, but there's still time to reach out for our postdoc position on climate change impact attribution! If you have experience with attribution science or climate epidemiology, and want to help us launch the Global Burden of Climate Change Study, reach out!

Really interesting new paper on the rising health effects of our warming world with some great data visualizations. Full paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Believe it or not, @alexandraphelan.bsky.social and I started talking about the concept for this workshop 5? 6? years ago, so it was absolutely amazing to finally pull this off with exactly the right people, especially in a year when it feels like we're taking a lot of L's on actionable science 🥰

🦇🦠 New preprint - in a long-term effort led by the amazing @mayajuman.bsky.social, we've shown that the ML tools developed by @viralemergence.org let us efficiently screen museum collections for pathogens with pandemic potential 🎉🔓 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Last week, we were lucky to host an international workshop on Pandemic Risk Scenarios for the 21st Century, with generous support from PAX sapiens and @viralemergence.org. Lots of lessons learned from climate and biodiversity science on how to design useful models and imagine better futures!

Check it out! New work in which we undertake the first systematic look at the science of health impact attribution, plus a great thread by @colincarlson.bsky.social below on attribution science and what we tried to accomplish with this study.

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

3️⃣ During the pandemic & at baseline, younger adults, men, & Hispanic & Black individuals have more contacts & are at greater disease risk These geographic & social differences in risk can help target public health resources & surveillance 📢 /11

2️⃣ Contact patterns vary across US counties regardless of disease 🌎 Based on population density, we expected urban counties 🏙️ to have higher contact rates than rural ones 🚜 This is true at baseline, but not during the pandemic, when urban areas were more responsive to gathering restrictions /10

1️⃣ Early in the pandemic, contact varied over time 📆 However, contact and COVID-19 incidence were anti-correlated during this period (when disease went ⬆️, contacts went ⬇️) Thus, after controlling for disease, there was no longer any systematic variation in contact over time /8

Our paper on US contact patterns is now published in The Lancet Digital Health! doi.org/10.1016/j.la... Thanks to my brilliant coauthors @zsusswein.bsky.social, @vcolizza.bsky.social, & @bansallab.bsky.social for their help with this project. Read on for an overview of our findings... 🧵

Want to do a postdoc with our group on something related to biodiversity conservation, policy, and the environment? Reach out - applications are open for the Donnelley fellowship! yibs.yale.edu/donnelley-fe...

New preprint! 🥳🎉 We looked at viral coinfection patterns at the largest scale ever in wildlife. We found a strong association among CoVs, PMVs, and influenza A, and higher coinfection rates in wildlife trade; plus, evidence that bats accumulate persistent infections. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We're hiring! We have funding for a 1-year (to start with, but hopefully longer) postdoc working on climate change impacts on health broadly, and helping us launch gbcc.study. Strong skills in epi methods or attribution science needed. Can potentially be remote. Please share!

We may have a one-year postdoctoral position opening! We're looking for someone with experience in attribution science OR very strong skills in climate epidemiology to come help us launch a Global Burden of Climate Change Study. Remote possible for the right person; aim to raise $ for a second year.

We may have a one-year postdoctoral position opening! We're looking for someone with experience in attribution science OR very strong skills in climate epidemiology to come help us launch a Global Burden of Climate Change Study. Remote possible for the right person; aim to raise $ for a second year.

Our "Joshua tree is CAM" paper is finally out: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Data collection started back in 2021, when we saw weird results in some RNAseq that made me stop and wonder if Joshua trees, long thought to be C3, were actually...CAM!

We had a great time at #ESA2025! Disclaimer: Ekiben sandwich not included in conference registration or ESA membership

"Conditional cash transfer could substantially contribute towards reducing AIDS-related inequalities and achieving the AIDS-related Sustainable Development Goal."

I am really excited to be a part of this team. We took our time writing this, putting a lot of thought into how our journeys as #NativesInSTEM were affected by different aspects of Universities and looking for commonalities across the world. I hope folks in academia appreciate this work.

“We find that all pathways may experience global shortages of up to 12 minerals by 2100 under the moderate scenario.” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This was just a fun side quest, but if our lab thought about this more in the future, I'd want to revisit some of the ideas from this 2020 preprint - rare or unique clinical presentations can improve syndromic surveillance for emerging diseases among endemic ones www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Like I said: a small part of a much bigger project, which I'll let @faustobustos.bsky.social tell you about - including a much longer-term effort to figure out how to improve WHO and PAHO case definitions / syndromic surveillance / clinical treatment for very hard to distinguish endemic arboviruses.

NEW! 🚨🦠 We trained ML algorithms to identify the clinical presentations that best distinguish pediatric dengue, chikungunya, and Zika. One notable finding: afebrile dengue may be being missed. A small part of a big project led by @faustobustos.bsky.social, out now 🔓 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

🌍 Green gains, blue losses From 2003–2021, plants on land grew more, but ocean productivity declined, likely due to climate warming. Land is boosting Earth’s carbon uptake, but oceans are showing signs of stress. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #ClimateCrisis #SciComm 🧪

In summer, Phoenix faces dual crises: extreme heat and drug overdoses. Our latest #HealthTalks examines how those two are connected. 💻 Hear from physicians Pope Moseley and David Sklar and substance-use researcher Raminta Daniulaityte, all @asuhealthsolutions.bsky.social faculty: ow.ly/F4RF50WyOOx

A little holiday news: Evolution of antifungal resistance in the environment www.nature.com/articles/s41... This started out as a little thought way back in early 2024 between @normanvanrhijn.bsky.social and I, and turned into a full on review! We hope it proves useful to the community.

Alright stop, collaborate and

New workshop paper out today with 60 of our closest friends, providing guidance on how to design a study attributing health impacts to climate change. Hopefully this helps expand the field and start closing the representation gaps we discuss in our forthcoming work link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A new paper in The Lancet Microbe lays the groundwork for a global science-policy body to tackle pandemic threats — modeled after the IPCC for climate change 🧪🧵

Ka rawe Dave and team! 👏 This is visionary work that could reshape how the world prepares for future health crises → www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

We're launching a Global Burden of Climate Change Study with support from @yalesph.bsky.social! It's been 20 years since the last one, and at least 4 million people have died. Stay tuned for preliminary results and a more formal announcement in a month or so. #CountEveryClimateDeath

A big announcement today! A huge round of thanks to @yalesph.bsky.social for the support to launch a Global Burden of Climate Change Study. There's nowhere in the world that's better positioned to do this kind of cross-cutting work than @yaleemd.bsky.social and YCCCH. ysph.yale.edu/news-article...

In a few weeks, we'll be publishing the finding that [redacted] people die every year because of climate change, equivalent to a loss of $[redacted]T USD, every year. Here's what it costs us to open that publication to you. We have no federal grants for that work, and can't apply for them.

New paper out modelling how the nutritional content of wild bird foods could affect disease transmission - a nice follow-up application of our Molecular Ecology study showing that food quality can affect immune function and disease tolerance. doi.org/10.1093/icb/... @durantlab.bsky.social

3️⃣ An "IPCC for pandemics" would let scientists develop consensus on key issues where the evidence is complex and sometimes contradictory - think airborne transmission, social distancing, herd immunity, school closures, pathogen origins, and most importantly, future risks - BEFORE the next pandemic.

🚨 Very, very big news. Today, a global coalition - including members of the IPCC, IPBES, and WHO expert advisors, as well as independent virologists, epidemiologists, and lawyers - started the process of creating an "IPCC for Pandemics." 🔓 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... 🧵 Five things to know 👉

Estimating the reproductive number from wastewater. It is much easier than some would suggest, and can be done without high-powered computing. A review and comparison of different methods from our team over here. 🧪 #EpiSky www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

👋 We’re still collecting responses!! We’d love your input if you’re in an adjacent field — already seeing some super cool questions that make me so excited for the workshop.

Viral -ologists of all kinds - molecular, ecological, evolutionary - if you haven't yet, consider joining our horizon scan study and help us identify 100 questions that are guiding where your field is going! Fill in the survey and get an invite to a workshop: 📝 airtable.com/appTW4ZoSFjR...

🚨 Our team just released a reproducible Docker pipeline for RNAseq assembly and annotation designed for nonmodel organisms! We're using it to explore how bats manage viral infections, but it's built for broad utility in wildlife transcriptomics. @viralemergence.org www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New article alert! Interested in crisis narratives in public health? (Including in AMR...?) Find our work HERE: journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/jc...

one signature of human impacts on the planet (esp climate change) is ecosystems becoming less unique—a process called "biotic homogenization". it turns out that isn't happening in the global oceans! colossal new synthesis led by @zoejean88.bsky.social on marine fishes: doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Open call: If you are a researcher working on a project estimating a cause-specific burden of disease attributable to climate change at regional to global scales, please reach out! We're looking for researchers who might be interested in joining a new collaborative network / workshop series.