Staff Directory

Wen's research focuses on the use of spatiotemporal statistics and mathematical modeling to elucidate the distribution and transmission dynamics of infectious diseases, with particular attention to vector-borne diseases. She holds a PhD in Biostatistics and Biomathematics from the Sorbonne Université in Paris, France, and her doctoral research provides insights into the determinants of Lyme borreliosis incidence in metropolitan France. Her work integrated a variety of data sources, including disease surveillance data, remote sensing/environmental data, and anthropogenic data, within an integrated framework that employed a Bayesian two-part spatiotemporal modeling approach. As a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia, Wen is currently working to identify populations at highest risk for Lyme disease in the northeastern US by understanding how LD risk varies across urbanization gradients in relation to different ecological hazards, individual risk behaviors, and sociodemographic variables.

Ursula is a veterinarian and PhD student who joined the lab in 2023. Her research aims to integrate disease ecology with eco-immunology. Ursula holds a BSc and MSc in Veterinary Medicine from Utrecht University (The Netherlands) and is a licensed veterinarian in both The Netherlands and New York State. For her research, she mainly works with raccoons, opossums and skunks around New York City. Her main interests are wildlife health, epidemiology, one health, eco-immunology and disease ecology. She aims to better understand how the raccoon immune system is affected by the urban to non-urban landscape and how this affects pathogen transmission and parasite burdens.

Sung-Joo is a PhD student who joined the lab in fall 2022. Her research integrates animal movement, wildlife diseases, and conservation biology. She enjoys studying animals on the move and using this knowledge for their conservation, especially via fighting against diseases. She received her BSc and MSc at Korea University, majoring in environmental planning, and has experience in researching dispersal patterns of pine wilt disease and movement and home ranges of black-tailed gulls using biotelemetry data. Currently, she is trying to better understand how the movement and landscape connectivity of hosts determine the zoonotic hazard alongside abiotic factors in tick-borne diseases

A native New Yorker, I attended Regis High School and the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, graduating with a degree in Biology. My primary research interest is better understanding human-wildlife interactions in an urban setting to help predict  cross-species disease transmission and spread. I have a passion for science education and have been teaching and researching, both in a volunteer and career capacity, for over 8 years now. I draw on my diverse experiences as a Cancer Research Volunteer at Weill-Cornell Medical School, a member of the Opioid Overdose Prevention Unit with the Baltimore Public Health Department (in association with Johns Hopkins University) and a Junior Zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo to blend critical education with exciting, high-intensity environments. 

Noah Edelman is an undergraduate student majoring in Environmental Biology. He has assisted in tick sampling for the eco-epidemiology lab in the 2024 and 2025 summer field seasons, and he will be conducting his senior thesis research with the eco-epidemiology lab in the summer 2026 field season, focusing on competitive interactions between foxes and raccoons. Noah has written about the eco-epidemiology lab’s work in the Columbia Undergraduate Research Blog, and presented on it at the 2024 Columbia Undergraduate Research Symposium. He also participated in the Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal (CUSJ) Summer Publishing Program, where he wrote an editorial article about the dilution effect in disease ecology for CUSJ. Noah is fascinated by vector-borne disease systems, and is passionate about science communication for a wide variety of audiences! 

Marie is a post-doctoral scientist interested in how socio-ecological factors influence zoonotic disease emergence and transmission. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2026. Marie holds a B.A. in Biology and Hispanic studies from Oberlin College and completed a Fulbright grant in Colombia, South America. For her M.S. in Ecology at San Francisco State University, Marie focused her research on the role of host community composition in Lyme disease transmission on the West Coast. At Columbia University, Marie aims to better understand vector-borne pathogen transmission across urban gradients and use these findings to inform equitable disease risk management.

Maria is a Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology (E3B). Her research integrates a wide range of empirical and analytical tools to disentangle the ecological and environmental drivers for the emergence of vector-borne diseases, particularly tick-borne. Current research focuses on the role of pathogen interactions, host community composition, climate and land use change in the epidemics of multiple tick-borne pathogens in the United States. Other research interests include landscape ecology, evolutionary ecology, behavioral ecology and conservation biology.

Linghui holds a Ph.D. in Economics and previously was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her doctoral research focused on the complex interactions between farmers’ decisions and ecosystem outcomes, particularly in agricultural and natural resource management. She explored integrated pest and pollinator management strategies using computational and statistical methods, uncovering optimal approaches to balancing pest control with pollinator conservation on watermelon farms. Additionally, she conducted empirical research, including choice experiment surveys, to understand farmers’ preferences for management strategies, which provided valuable insights into farmers’ decisions toward pest and pollinator management. At Columbia, she works on mathematical modeling of tick-borne interventions targeting ticks and wildlife hosts and conduct social surveys on eco-social determinants of tick-borne disease risk.

Kai is a disease ecologist working in One Health, studying parasite and infectious disease dynamics across wildlife and human systems. They ask how global change reshapes where diseases occur, who is exposed, and what the consequences are for wildlife and human health. Kai completed an MSc in Ecology at the Universität Bremen, Germany, studying parasites of sea otters and pinnipeds. Their PhD at the University of Alberta, Canada, investigated parasites, particularly zoonotic species, and metal contaminants in river otters, mink, and muskrats in western Canada, and their effects on host health. As a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Santa Barbara, they examined disparities in vector-borne and zoonotic disease risk in marginalized communities and the role of dog ownership and land use change in cutaneous leishmaniasis incidence in South America. Kai also founded Scientific QUEERies, a digital seminar series highlighting the research and experiences of LGBTQ+ scientists worldwide, and is passionate about improving equity, inclusion, and representation in science. At Columbia, they will investigate how urbanization and co-infection shape pathogen dynamics and host immunity in wildlife, and how diagnostic bias and social inequities drive disparities in Lyme disease risk in New York.

Junyi earned an M.S. in Biostatistics from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Within the Eco-epidemiology Lab, she conducts statistical analyses and develops ArcGIS-based maps to study tick-borne disease risk across urban gradients. Her work applies spatial and Bayesian modeling to explore environmental and behavioral factors shaping exposure, and she is broadly interested in advancing statistical methods for complex public health data.

Heather earned BA/BS and MS degrees in English and biology from Rutgers University and Montclair State University, where she investigated the prevalence of Borrelia burgdorferi in resident and migratory bird species. Her Ph.D. work at the University of Rhode Island evaluated the use of a photo-based tick reporting system as both a surveillance method and community science education tool. After earning her doctorate, Heather combined a focus on socio-ecological tick surveillance and spatial modeling at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she most recently completed a postdoc. There she modeled current and future distributions of four tick species of concern in Illinois using ecological niche models, surveyed numerous at-risk demographics regarding their knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions of ticks and tickborne illness, and investigated the use of eDNA for low-abundance tick field detection. At Columbia she will continue using socio-ecological approaches to disease outbreak prediction and transmission prevention using field, laboratory, and statistical modeling tools, with the aim of identifying integrative One Health solutions.

Danning earned a MA degree in statistics from Columbia University, where she gained experience in spatial modeling, geo-statistics, and machine learning. Her work has focused on analyzing complex datasets to better understand human mobility patterns and environmental risk factors. As part of the Eco-epidemiology Lab's project Measuring Tick Risk Along an Urbanization Gradient, Danning analyzes mobility and survey data to  classify movement patterns and explore their relationship to tick exposure. She is particularly interested in applying spatial statistics, clustering methods, and GIS tools to study vector-borne disease risk in urban environments, with the goal of informing public health strategies and disease prevention efforts.  

Brigitte is a Master’s student from New York, NY. Her research focuses on disease ecology, particularly brucellosis transmission at the wildlife-livestock interface in Montana’s Paradise Valley. For her thesis, she is combining drone-based aerial surveys, AI-driven elk detection, and rancher-reported data to map elk distribution and identify areas of elevated spillover risk. Brigitte earned her BA in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University, where she studied viral spillover in marine mammals. Outside of research, she has been a lifelong equestrian with experience ranging from international show jumping to ranching, a ski instructor, a Formula 4 driver, and an avid long-distance runner. 

Alyssa is a Master's student interested in studying pathogens and parasites in wildlife, and has enjoyed working with a wide array of animals including rodents, birds, and raccoons. Alyssa holds a BA in Organismal Biology and Politics from Pitzer College, California, where they wrote their senior thesis on the dynamics of nematode coinfections within hosts. After graduating, Alyssa completed a Fulbright grant in Poland researching the prevalence and genetic diversity of blood-borne diseases in voles and wolves. Alyssa aims to continue studying parasite-host relationships and coinfection at Columbia, and they are particularly interested in focusing on zoonotic diseases in animal populations that live in proximity to humans.

Adara earned her MS in human evolution and behavior from University College London (UCL) in 2025, and previously obtained her BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Toronto. Her research interests span from animal behavior to genomics, molecular evolution, and microbiology. Her past work has focused on the human-specific genetic adaptations underlying host regulation of the gut-microbiome. Adara joined the Eco-Epi lab in 2025 as a research coordinator and lab manager, and she is particularly interested in the molecular mechanisms underlying tick-borne diseases (TBD) and pathogen evolution.