Predicting Mosquito-Borne Disease Transmission in a Rapidly Changing World

From climate change to land use, anthropogenic alterations to the environment are occurring at unprecedented rates and on an unthinkable scale. These developments alter the built landscape and our access to life-sustaining resources.

But they also disrupt the ecological relationships that bind together humans, mosquitoes, and parasites. Upsetting these relationships results in changes to the distribution of host organisms, rates of contact, the spread of infectious diseases, and the seasonality of transmission risk.

Disease ecologist Courtney Murdock will focus on understanding the climate variables that influence mosquito-borne disease transmission. Deploying advanced models of climate-based disease spread, Murdock’s research seeks to predict transmission patterns in order to respond to the epidemiological effects of the climate crisis.

Harvard Radcliffe Institute gratefully acknowledges the Ethel and David Jackson Fund for the Future Climate, which is supporting this event.

Speaker

Courtney Murdock, associate professor of entomology, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University

Moderator

Immaculata De Vivo, codirector of the science program, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School; and professor of epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Event Video