I am delighted to have been awarded this grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand. The project will involve modelling the spillover effects of infectious diseases using a mathematical model of human, livestock and gorilla interactions from Uganda.
Project Collaborators
Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH, Uganda), led by Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, will be the local collaborator. CTPH has over 10 years’ experience using Population, Health and Environment approaches to reduce threats to mountain gorillas
Jamie Lloyd-Smith (University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA, USA) has extensive experience studying ‘spillover’ dynamics at the human-animal interface.
Hayley MacGregor (University of Sussex, UK) is a human clinician and medical anthropologist with extensive experience working with communities in Africa.
Reed Hranac, MSc, joined the group here in New Zealand and will be working with myself and Jonathan Marshall with a number of collaborators on the temporal and spatial dynamics of infectious diseases in bats. His focus will be filoviruses and white-nose syndrome. Reed did his MSc at Northern Arizona University in the US with Dr Nathan Nieto on the ecology of rodent-borne hantaviruses.