Julie Shapiro, whose background is in disease ecology, studies the relationships between wildlife, humans, domestic animals, and anthropogenic disturbance, and she uses ecological modeling to understand and manage emerging diseases. She earned her PhD in Interdisciplinary Ecology at the University of Florida, where she studied the effects of land-use change on bats and their microbes in southern Africa and modeled the role of bat diversity and anthropogenic disturbance on Ebola virus spillover. In addition to her research on bats, she has also worked with small mammals, fungi, and Leishmania. Her current work at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale: Inserm) in Lyon, France, focuses on the ecology of antibiotic resistance in hospital networks, using metapopulation and community ecology models.

 

Passionate about science communication and outreach, Julie gives numerous presentations and leads activities at science festivals and in classrooms.

 

Julie is very excited about joining Dr. Shai Pilosof’s Ecological Complexity Lab in the Department of Life Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where she will study disease transmission networks and hopes to develop better predictive models of disease transmission with broad implications for human health, and to make major theoretical and applied contributions to disease ecology.