PhD Researcher, Emerging Infectious Diseases - University of Alaska Fairbanks
You investigate how climate change drives the emergence of novel pathogens in Arctic wildlife ecosystems and their potential spread to human populations. You analyze microbial community dynamics in thawing permafrost using metagenomics, next-generation sequencing, and bioinformatics pipelines. You integrate environmental chemistry, biophysics, and epidemiological data to model zoonotic disease transmission while applying domain expertise to evaluate and annotate complex datasets for AI model training and human feedback projects. • Investigated climate-driven pathogen emergence and zoonotic spillover • Performed metagenomic and sequencing-based microbial community analyses • Built and used bioinformatics pipelines for data processing • Applied scientific evaluation and annotation for model training support