latest updates

May 2023: The lab returns from a very busy two weeks of bat sampling in Belize, including four-year overdue success at GPS tracking vampire bats for our National Geographic grant. We also celebrate lots of recent funding success, including DISC postdoctoral awards to Molly Simonis and Amanda Vicente, another Sutton Scholarship to Taylor Verrett, travel awards from Colorado State University to Amanda to attend the 2023 Genomics of Diseases in Wildlife Workshop and to Kristin Dyer to attend the 2023 Radar Aeroecology Workshop, Robberson Travel awards to Lauren Lock and Meagan Allira for summer conference support, and a Grant-in-Aid from the American Society of Mammalogists to Lauren. Also big kudos to Gracie Hedgpeth for receiving honorable mention for their UROP presentation, Meagan Allira for having their abstract accepted for the Wildlife Disease Association student poster competition, and Anushka Sukhadia for being accepted into OU HSC's Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program​. 

April 2023: The lab receives funding from the Human Frontier Science Program for a new, three-year grant on Neotropical bat foraging, immunity, and infection in the context of self-medication behavior with Ralph Simon (Nuremberg Zoo) and Rachel Page (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute). We'll be welcoming Bret Demory as our new lab technician, with Kristin Dyer shifting into a MS in August on bat migration and ectoparasites. Lastly, big congrats to Briana Betke, who has received a NSF PRFB to spend the next three years predicting (and testing) bat–virus links in the Americas.

March 2023: A new commentary piece on linking predictive, field, and in vitro studies of host–virus interactions is out in Lancet Microbe with Arinjay Banerjee at VIDO, as part of a new collaboration on developing relevant cell lines and organoid models for our Neotropical and migratory bat systems. We are also thrilled to be welcoming Alicia Roistacher and Caroline Cummings as incoming PhD students as part of VERENA, both of whom will be working on questions at the interface of bat immunology, data science, environmental change, and predictive modeling. Additionally, we receive collaborative funding from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation with Hayley Lanier to (re)sample bat communities in eastern Oklahoma as part of a long-term community change project and to document baselines for bat immunity as well as SARS-CoV-2 spillback. Last but not least, congratulations to Gracie Hedgpeth for accepting a PhD position at the University of Notre Dame to work with Dr. Jason Rohr and to Kristin Dyer for receiving Honorable Mention for her NSF GRFP application.