Annie Gatewood, Yale EPH graduate student
The projects aims to use molecular techniques to study the ecology and epidemiology of vector-borne and zoonotic disease agents. A rotation was completed in the MSCG Lab during Anne’s first semester at Yale, where she worked with a dataset of eastern equine encephalitis virus sequences to learn techniques in sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis. The training in the MSCG lab ultimately gave her tools and perspective that were not available in her own department and which valuable to her interdisciplinary PhD thesis on the molecular evolution and ecology of the Lyme disease agent Borrelia burgdorferi. She applied for a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant for public health dissertation research in which the MSCG lab was included as a resource (“Landscape Genetics of Borrelia burgdorferi and Implications for Lyme Disease Emergence in Eastern North America”). Throughout her PhD at Yale, she continued to interact and draw on the lab’s unique expertise and resources for both formal training and informal feedback and brainstorming.