.jpg "Kayla M. Kauffman photo")
PhD Student
University of California, Santa Barbara
I am a Ph.D. student in Hillary Young's lab in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara. I am broadly interested in parasite sharing between wildlife, domestic animals, and people if affected by land use, habitat degradation, and invasive species. I use spatial data to build networks to describe how these changes alter transmission pathways and then test the predictions made by these networks using perturbations. I have ongoing projects studying the multispecies effects of a Leptospira intervention and a project studying the likelihood of parasite infections in people based on their utilization of "high-risk" habitats with many infected small mammals.