Lab Members

Graduate Students:

The Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health has a plethora of information about graduate (MPH, MS and PhD) studies. MS and PhD students should contact me directly if interested in working with my group.

I am also a member of the Entomology and Insect Science GIDP. If you have more entomology/ecological leanings you may want to peruse their website.

Thomas Moore is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology at the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health (MEZCOPH). Prior to coming to the University of Arizona, Thomas completed the CDC-APHL Infectious Disease Laboratory Fellowship where he served as an epidemiologist and virologist at the Tennessee Department of Health’s Vector-borne Diseases Program. Thomas’ research interests include exploring the ecology of zoonotic and vector-borne disease transmission using One Health approaches and optimizing current surveillance procedures for such diseases. His current dissertation work is examining the utility of mosquito surveillance to identify areas of high-risk West Nile virus exposure in rural and urban environments of the United States. Thomas’ work is partially supported by the Pacific Southwest Center of Excellence in Vector-borne Diseases (PacVec) Training Grant Program.

Erika Austhof earned her BS in Microbiology and her MPH and PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Arizona. She is an Epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. She is currently engaged in collaborative research in the fields of climate change and health, food-borne illness and long term sequelae, and the use of new tools and technologies in public health research. As project coordinator for the Arizona BRACE and CLIMAS projects, she helps facilitate collaborations between multi-sectoral groups and evaluates the impact of these projects on public health due to climate change.

Shelby Calvillo graduated with a BS in Public Health in 2015. She is starting the MPH program in epidemiology at the University of Arizona in the fall. Her research interest includes vector-borne diseases specifically dealing with mosquitoes. Her undergraduate internship project was mapping positive Aedes aegypti trapping sites in Pinal County, AZ.

Robert Clark is a graduate of the UofA with a BS in Public Health. He was a UROC fellow in the Brown Lab over the 2013 summer and successfully published his project in the journal of Vectorborne Zoonotic Diseases. Robert’s project used Pima  County rabies data to describe the temporal and spatial nature of rabies in Pima County using positive exposure data from 2004 to 2010. He is currently a graduate student at the UofA in Global Health – Maternal Child Health with ultimate goal of continuing research in infectious disease epidemiology among children. 

Victoria Hansen earned her BS in Biochemistry from Arizona State University in 2012 and finished an MS in Epidemiology at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona (12/2015). Her interests include infectious disease, specifically zoonotic disease, and preparedness.

Steve Haenchen, MPH, came to the University of Arizona in 2011 seeking a PhD in epidemiology. Since joining the college of public health he has focused his research on how climate affects vector-borne disease transmission.  

Riley Johnson is an undergraduate studying public health at the University of Arizona. She graduated in May 2017 with a B.S. in Public Health and a minor in Spanish. She helped manage our MTurk project to assess vaccine uptake behavior.  

Marvin Langston graduated in 2016 from the UA program and is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, MO. His research interests focus on infectious, inflammatory, and environmental cancer etiologies. For his thesis, Marvin evaluated the spatial epidemiology of melanoma and its relation to the environmental carcinogen, arsenic. He also devised an interesting way to retrospectively assess UV exposure. 

Erin Pelley is an undergraduate studying Public Health with a minor in Spanish at the University of Arizona. Her work with the lab was through the GRADLink fellowship with faculty, undergraduate and graduate students from geography, mathematics, and public health to map and describe the spread of vector-borne diseases throughout the Caribbean. Erin has also been involved with a research workgroup studying the H. pylori infection and gastric cancer identifying trends in gastric cancer incidence among various ethnicities using SEER databases.

Quyymun Rabby  graduated with a BS in Biology from University of Arizona in 2014 and an MPH in Epidemiology at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health in 2016. She was supported by a HRSA Traineeship to work on a joint project between the Brown Lab, Margaret Wilder (UA Geography), and  Arizona Department of Health Services to develop a vulnerability assessment report on climate change and its impact on vector-borne diseases and valley fever in Arizona. 

Ellen Shelly, M.S., Ellen obtained her BA in Biology from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois and her MS in Epidemiology from the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona with a thesis entitled “Chagas disease in Mexico.” Her thesis was published in Public Health Reports in 2015. She is currently working as a Project Evaluator with National Community Health Partners in Tucson.

Sharia Smith is a Medical Anthropology and Peace Studies double major at the University of Notre Dame and was a FRONTERA Border Health Scholar in the Brown Lab over the 2013 summer. She collected mortality rates from 1990-2010 in order to investigate the changing rates of infectious disease mortality in the United States. In addition she looked at 15 infectious diseases of modern importance and looked specifically at differences in infectious disease mortality in counties along the US-Mexico border compared with the rest of the US. She’s returned to Indiana to continue her studies, while working with a human rights anthropologist and conducting research on sport related concussions. 

Rachel Treistman was an undergraduate student studying public health at the University of Arizona. She graduated in May 2017 with a B.S. in Public Health. Her project evaluated temporal trends in vaccine coverage and measles incidence in the US. Professional interests include: epidemiology, minority health and environmental health.

Valerie Madera-Garcia is a third-year PhD student in Epidemiology at the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry with minor in Biology from the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico in San Germán, Puerto Rico. Prior to coming to Arizona, Valerie completed her Masters of Public Health in Environmental Health from Ponce Health Sciences University in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Her primary research interest is mosquito-borne diseases, with emphasis on Dengue transmission in Puerto Rico, environmental factors influencing its transmission, breeding site selection by vectors, and risk modeling of dengue. As a graduate research assistant for the PEST Lab, Valerie is currently working in a project related to green infrastructures and their potential to become a source of mosquitoes in Tucson.

Lisa Labita Woodson, MPH PhD was a PhD student at the University of Arizona whose research took her into rural and remote communities of Peru’s Amazon jungle to collect qualitative and quantitative data on the downstream impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent pregnancy and educational attainment. She was awarded both a Fulbright-Fogarty and Global Health Equity Scholar (GHES) fellowship to support her project. Drawing from the experiences of her participants in the Amazon, she founded the Beyond Global Health project with funding from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. This is a space that explores the intersection of poetry and art and global health research as tools for social justice and decolonization.