I’m pleased to have this paper—Off-house survival of blacklegged ticks—finally published! It represents the work of dozens of project assistants and two stellar research associates doing the hard work of finding ticks (>9000!) and putting them in bespoke “soil core enclosures” with data loggers only to dig them up weeks or months later to search […]
Pedro Viadanna is joining our lab from the University of Florida and we couldn’t be more excited! He has extensive experience in veterinary epidemiology, virus discovery, and more! He will be working on our NSF-funded project,“Socioeconomic and Epidemiological Drivers of Pathogen Dynamics in Wildlife Trade Networks” and will lead efforts in the Brunner lab to […]
I’m hoping to recruit a postdoctoral research associate to our lab to work on our NSF-EEID research on disease in the U.S. amphibian trade. See the advertisement, below. EEID_Postdoc_Ad.pdf
We are all atwitter about being award a new grant from the National Science Foundation Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases! Titled, “Socioeconomic and Epidemiological Drivers of Pathogen Dynamics in Wildlife Trade Networks,” this work focuses on understanding the factors that magnify or reduce the spread through and potential for pathogen spillover from the live […]
Emily Burton recently was awarded a research grant from the Huyck Preserve and Biological Research Station in Rensselaerville, New York! Her research, as the title of the proposal states, is focused on “Estimating encounters between blacklegged ticks and hosts,” which is a challenging, but very important goal for understanding what limits tick populations, whether they […]
I will be offering a workshop at the Global Amphibian and Reptile Disease conference in Knoxville this August. You can find more information about it here: https://utconferences.eventsair.com/gard-conference/workshops–field-trips Our statistics, from regressions to SEMs, are association machines. They cannot, by themselves, tell us anything about causation, but only the degree and direction of statistical associations. We […]
Some members of the lab have been working with an interesting group of academics (Matt Gray, Neelam Pudyal, and others) and people in the pet trade (Reptiles by Mack, Josh’s Frogs) and one of their member organizations (Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council) to better understand the U.S. amphibian pet trade—composition, connections, values, practices, etc.—and eventually […]
Erica Crespi has been hard at work over the last few years developing a new aquatic phenomics system. It has capabilities to measure behavior and physiology (e.g., metabolic rate) en-masse and under controlled light, temperature, and chemical conditions. I think it will be a game-changer for our work, going forward. Read more about it here: […]
We in the BrunnerLab wish Madelyn Kirsch the best as she starts graduate school at Oklahoma in the Siler lab (where Kai Wang went, some years back). She is thrilled to get to combine the dissection, extraction, and qPCR skillz she developed in my lab (thanks for busting through all those samples, Madelyn!) and her […]
I’m pleased (and relieved) to see two manuscripts become available. The first is a book chapter in Hurst’s Studies in Viral Ecology written with V. Greg Chinchar and Amanda Duffus. It summarizes much of what we know about ranavirus in amphibians, plus what we know about some others, especially amphibian herpes viruses (e.g., Lucke’s Tumor […]