Postdoctoral Research Award 2021

Tobias Brett, postdoctoral researcher in the Odum School of Ecology and the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases, develops new approaches for predicting and mitigating threats from emerging infectious diseases. He designed a detection algorithm that combines early-warning signals into a single measure of emergence risk, successfully applying it to four emerging disease outbreaks, and developed a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics that demonstrated the infeasibility of achieving herd immunity by allowing the virus to spread, producing a paper that was downloaded 80,000 times in about six months.