UC Berkeley Research Team
Dr.
Robert Spear is an engineer by training and received the
Ph.D. degree in Control Engineering from Cambridge University. He has
been a faculty member at the School of Public Health at Berkeley since
1971. His early work concerned the exposure of agricultural workers to
pesticides. In more recent years his work has concerned applications of
mathematical and statistical techniques in the assessment and control of
human exposures to both chemical and biological agents focused
principally on determinants of the incidence and control of
schistosomiasis in the mountainous regions of Sichuan Province in
southwestern China. Dr. Spear was the founding Director of the
University's Center for Occupational and Environmental Health. He was
the Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate in 1999-2000.
He has authored or co-authored over 100 papers in the scientific
literature.
More information about his research can be found at his website:
http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/people/spear.htm
Dr.
Edmund Seto is a researcher in the School of Public Health at
the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include
health mapping, spatial epidemiology, GIS and remote sensing,
mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, and health impact
assessment. His dissertation work considered the use of Landsat TM
imagery to identify snail habitats associated with schistosomiasis
transmission. Dr. Seto's recent spatial analyses have found an
association between individual-level exposure and schistosomiasis
re-infection. He is currently working on spatial-interaction models to
better understand how connected environments contribute to the
persistence and spread of schistosomiasis transmission.
More information about his research can be found at his website:
http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/china/edmund
Dr. Song Liang’s primary areas of research are risk
assessment of waterborne pathogens, the environmental determinants of
infectious disease, and environment-orientated interventions. Much of
Dr. Liang’s work also focuses on mathematical modeling and the
epidemiology of infectious diseases; the public health applications of
Geographical Information Systems (GISs); and international environmental
health issues.
More information about his research can be found at his website:
http://cph.osu.edu/divisions/ehs/ehsfacstaff/liangs/
Dr. Justin Remais leads the Environmental Change and
Parasite Diffusion Project at UC Berkeley, funded by the NSF/NIH Ecology
of Infectious Diseases Program. His work examines the spatial and
temporal factors that propagate environmentally mediated tropical
diseases. Key to his approach is the integration of environmental and
epidemiologic modeling techniques to assess the environmental drivers of
disease transmission in a changing landscape. In his current work, Dr.
Remais applies field ecology, epidemiological methods, spatial analysis
and statistical and mechanistic modeling to the control of parasitic
disease in western China, a region undergoing rapid environmental
change. Dr. Remais has taught graduate and undergraduate level courses
in Global Environmental Health and Climate Change and Health at UC
Berkeley.
More information about his research can be found at his website:
http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/china/remais/
Elizabeth
Carlton is interested in how environmental conditions,
particularly access to safe water supplies and sanitation, affect the
distribution of infectious diseases. Her current work focuses on
predictors of schistosomiasis reemergence, primarily using
epidemiological methods. She is interested in defining high-risk
populations and environments for reemergence in order to better inform
disease surveillance and transmission control programs. She has a B.S.
in Biology from Yale University and an M.P.H. in Environmental Health
Sciences, from Columbia University. From 1999 to 2001 she was a Peace
Corps Volunteer in Honduras, Central America where she focused on
watershed protection and training environmental leaders.
To contact Elizabeth Carlton please email:
ejcarlton@berkeley.edu
Shuo
Wang graduated from Tsinghua University with a master’s in
2007. He is a PhD student in Environmental Health Science at UC Berkeley.
Adam
Akullian completed his bachelors of science in environmental
science at Brown University. He has been involved in field data
collection and is currently working on developing GIS-based hydrology
models to predict snail and parasite dispersal pathways between
villages.
To contact Adam Akullian please email:
Adam_Akullian@berkeley.edu
Ishaan
Swarup is an undergraduate research assistant. His primary
focus is on biological/mathematical modeling, with an emphasis on the
exploration and interplay of processes within the current model.
Yuen
Wai Hung is an undergraduate research assistant. She works on the
development of q-PCR assay to quantify S. japonicum cercariae in water
for the project.
Sacha
Ferguson is an undergraduate research assistant. She researches
social connections and mobility in the re-emerging counties and how this
might be related to disease prevalence.