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Galvani to Receive Young Investigators' Prize from American
Society of Naturalists
Alison Galvani, Ph.D. |
Alison Galvani, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
in the Yale School of Public Health's Division of Epidemiology
of Microbial Diseases, has been selected to receive a Young Investigators' Prize
from the American Society of Naturalists (ASN). ASN, a prestigious group
of evolutionary ecologists, publishes The American Naturalist,
the leading journal in the field of evolutionary ecology. Young Investigators' Prizes
recognize outstanding and promising work of investigators at an early career
stage. Galvani will receive her award and present a paper entitled “Epidemiology
Meets Evolutionary Ecology” at ASN's joint meeting with the
Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biologists,
to be held from June 10 to 14 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Galvani's
research focuses on how evolutionary forces shape the engagement between
infectious agents and the immune system of individual hosts, and, more
generally, how evolution affects host-parasite (with parasite defined very
broadly) interactions at the population level. In particular, she has shown
that host and pathogen heterogeneity can have important repercussions for
many aspects of the epidemiology and evolution of both populations, including
the patterns of disease distribution, the intensity of competition between
parasite strains, age-dependent profiles of infection intensity, and the
evolution of virulence. Galvani has collaborated with Merck scientists
to assess the public health impact of their human papillomavirus vaccine.
She has also quantitatively evaluated the mechanism of progression from
HIV to AIDS, and determined the historical selective pressures that acted
on the HIV resistance allele CCR5-delta 32. Much of this work has direct
implications for the potential success of different control policies and
for the persistence of disease.
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