Brief Bio

I am a disease ecologist. I study insects, people, housing, and infectious disease. Since 2004 I’ve focused on controlling the ‘Chirimacha’, an insect vector of Chagas disease, in the city of Arequipa, Peru. The bug is almost gone, and we’re now using a surveillance system patterned after the mammalian immune system to make sure it doesn’t come back. I also work on housing policy and bed bugs in Philadelphia. I’m not very interested in generalizable knowledge–I prefer studying the idiosyncratic–the history, politics, and ecology that leads to the emergence and maintenance of infectious diseases in populations–and especially in the complexity of controlling them.