Maureen Kessler, Graduate Student, USA

Maureen is a PhD candidate at Montana State University. She earned her master's degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and is broadly interested in the ecology of zoonotic pathogens. For her dissertation, she will be using an interdisciplinary approach across scales to investigate the dynamics of Hendra virus in reservoir populations of Australian fruit bats. More specifically, Maureen is using fieldwork and model-based approaches to investigate energetics and decision-making in bat foraging strategies between remnant native forest and the urban environments where virus spillover occurs. Concurrently, she is analyzing patterns of viral diversity within and between colonies for signatures of the epidemiological mechanisms driving Hendra virus phylodynamics in bat populations.