The Carlson Lab @ Yale

@carlsonlab.bsky.social

We work on planetary problems. Currently: counting climate change-related deaths; pandemic risk assessment in a changing biosphere; data, science, and vaccine access during public health emergencies. 👉 carlsonlab.bio

New work in progress on primate reservoirs of arboviruses - when do they actually matter for transmission? and where will climate change take them - on display at the Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases Symposium last Friday!

Cecilia Sanchez presents a slide showing geographic gaps in sampling effortHailey Robertson presents on arbovirus enzootic cycles

A long-term dream of mine has been to bridge @viralemergence.org's work on AI/ML-driven viral risk assessment with AI/ML-driven work on drug discovery. This would make a great topic for this fellowship here at Yale! If you're interested in applying, reach out. medicine.yale.edu/biomedical-d...

Yale University and Boehringer Ingelheim Biomedical Data Science Fellowship Program

Yale University, in partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, launched in 2021 a Biomedical Data Science

medicine.yale.edu

We're looking for a full-stack developer! Help us build the best open data platforms for pandemic prediction in the world. Probably a short-term contract, but if you're looking for a full-time gig, let's talk. Inquire within: www.viralemergence.org/blog/were-hi...

We’re Hiring! — Verena

The Verena Institute is looking for a full stack developer or full stack development team (hereafter, the “Supplier”) to assist with the maintenance, documentation, and development of the Pathogen H...

viralemergence.org

Exciting news to start 2026: for the first time ever, the PHAROS repository for wildlife disease surveillance is a journal-recommended home for your archived data! Thanks to Integrative and Comparative Biology for taking the leap with us 🦠🔢➡️🌎💻💫 academic.oup.com/icb/pages/Ge...

General_Instructions

Instructions for Authors Authors who publish their papers under our open access model or who are NIH-funded will have their paper automatically depos

academic.oup.com

🚨 We're about to start reviewing applications, but there's still time to reach out for our postdoc position on climate change impact attribution! If you have experience with attribution science or climate epidemiology, and want to help us launch the Global Burden of Climate Change Study, reach out!

yale's beautiful campus from overhead

3️⃣ During the pandemic & at baseline, younger adults, men, & Hispanic & Black individuals have more contacts & are at greater disease risk These geographic & social differences in risk can help target public health resources & surveillance 📢 /11

Figure showing contact by age, gender, race or ethnicity, and setting during the pandemic and at baseline

(A) Mean pandemic and baseline non-household contact rate by age. Each point represents a county-age category. Analysis was limited to counties with five or more responses per age category per week. Contact decreases with age.

(B) Mean pandemic and baseline non-household contact rate by gender. Each point represents a county-gender category. Analysis was limited to counties with five or more responses per gender category
per week. Contact is higher in men than women.

(C) Mean pandemic and baseline non-household contact rate by race or ethnicity. Each point represents a state-race or ethnicity category. Analysis was limited to states with ten or more responses
per race or ethnicity category per week. All racial and ethnic categories are non-Hispanic unless labelled otherwise. Other denotes individuals who reported their race as American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or other, or as falling in multiple categories. Contact is lowest in Asian respondents, and highest in individuals reporting other or multiple race categories.

(D) Mean pandemic and baseline non-household contact rate by setting. Each point represents a county-setting. Analysis was
limited to counties with ten or more responses per setting per week. Contact is highest at work, followed by shopping, then social settings.

2️⃣ Contact patterns vary across US counties regardless of disease 🌎 Based on population density, we expected urban counties 🏙️ to have higher contact rates than rural ones 🚜 This is true at baseline, but not during the pandemic, when urban areas were more responsive to gathering restrictions /10

Figure showing spatial heterogeneity and urban–rural gradient of pandemic and estimated non-pandemic contact

(A) Mean number of non-household contacts per person per day for each county relative to the national mean (8⋅7 contacts per person per day) during the COVID-19
pandemic (Oct 1, 2020, to April 30, 2021). There was high spatial heterogeneity in contact, even within states, which was fairly consistent across time. Counties shaded in grey did not have a sufficient sample size to estimate contact. 

(B) Map of inferred mean number of non-household contacts per person per day for
each county relative to the national mean (10⋅9 contacts per person per day) in a non-pandemic scenario. Spatial heterogeneity in contact remains high, although which counties have values above and below the national mean has shifted compared with the pattern observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

(C) The mean contact rate (non-household contacts) for each county decreases with increasing urbanicity during the pandemic, but increases with urbanicity during inferred non-pandemic times.
Only counties with ten or more responses per week each week (from Oct 1, 2020, to April 30, 2021) are included. NCHS class describes the urbanicity of the county, with 1 indicating a large central metropolitan area and 6 representing rural, non-core areas. NCHS=National Center for Health Statistics.

1️⃣ Early in the pandemic, contact varied over time 📆 However, contact and COVID-19 incidence were anti-correlated during this period (when disease went ⬆️, contacts went ⬇️) Thus, after controlling for disease, there was no longer any systematic variation in contact over time /8

Figure showing contact dynamics observed over time during the COVID-19 pandemic and estimated non-pandemic contact dynamics, by county

(A) Mean number of daily non-household contacts for individual counties over time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Contact is presented as a Z score relative to each
county’s mean to allow comparison between time series despite the large range of mean contact values across counties. Each line represents a county and is coloured by mean contact relative to the national mean. The black line shows the Z score of the centred 3-week rolling average of national COVID-19 case incidence for context.
Counties had similar contact dynamics over time: most counties had higher contact during the summer of 2020, and all had lower contact during the winter of 2020–21. Counties in which contact decreased in the summer of 2020 were typically in states that had a higher incidence of COVID-19 during that time. 

(B) Mean contact rate (non- household contacts) in the absence of disease (baseline; slate) was effectively constant over time, compared with observed contact during the pandemic (teal), across a diverse set of counties. We controlled for disease using a linear regression model that predicts contact from national case incidence, state and county policy data, and county vaccination coverage. This analysis is restricted to Oct 1, 2020, to April 30, 2021, to encompass a full wave of COVID-19. Shaded areas represent 1 SD above and below the fitted contact value or estimated non-pandemic value.

We may have a one-year postdoctoral position opening! We're looking for someone with experience in attribution science OR very strong skills in climate epidemiology to come help us launch a Global Burden of Climate Change Study. Remote possible for the right person; aim to raise $ for a second year.

The Global Burden of Climate Change Study Working Group

We may have a one-year postdoctoral position opening! We're looking for someone with experience in attribution science OR very strong skills in climate epidemiology to come help us launch a Global Burden of Climate Change Study. Remote possible for the right person; aim to raise $ for a second year.

The Global Burden of Climate Change Study Working Group

I am really excited to be a part of this team. We took our time writing this, putting a lot of thought into how our journeys as #NativesInSTEM were affected by different aspects of Universities and looking for commonalities across the world. I hope folks in academia appreciate this work.

Lydia Jennings, PhD@1nativesoilnerd.bsky.social · 12mo ago

New article led by Tara McAllister & co-authored by Lelani Walker, @niiyokamigaabaw.bsky.social, myself, Bradley Moggridge, Serena Naepi, Brittany Kamai and @napaaqtuk.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...