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Mercedes Pascual
Professor
Ph.D., Joint Program of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995
U-M affiliation(s)
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Center for the Study of Complex Systems
Contact information
University of Michigan
2045 Kraus Natural Science Bldg.
830 N. University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1048
Phone: (734) 615-9808, office
(734) 615-9805, lab
Fax: (734) 763-0544
Email: pascual@umich.edu
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Fields of study
Theoretical ecology – disease ecology
Academic background
I received my Ph.D degree in 1995 from the Joint Program of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship for studies at Princeton, and more recently, a Centennial Fellowship in Global and Complex Systems from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. I am currently affiliated with the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at UM and with the Santa Fe Institute as an external faculty.
Graduate students
Sarah Cobey, Diego Ruiz-Moreno, Yan Yancy Lo, Andres Baeza, Edward Baskerville
Postdoctoral fellow
Katia Koelle
News
NOAA grant award
Professors Mercedes Pascual and Aaron King have been awarded a three-year $395,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for their project “Cholera prediction: The role of the oceans and nonlinear disease dynamics.” This research is a natural extension of Pascual’s previous work with the Oceans and Human Health Initiative. Cholera is heavily influenced by oceanic variability across multiple spatial and temporal scales, providing a strong linkage between the oceans and human health. Cholera is ideal for the development and assessment of quantitative approaches for an early-warning system of disease risk based on ocean variability. Results from studying cholera can guide the development of similar models for bacterial pathognes in coastal waters and other climate-sensitive diseases.
Pascual appointed HHMI investigator
Professor Mercedes Pascual has been appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. The $600 million initiative from one of the world’s largest private philanthropies will fund 56 of America’s most innovative scientists.
Pascual builds mathematical models to help identify when and how cholera, malaria and other diseases might become epidemics. This will enable public health agencies to prepare for or possibly prevent, life-threatening outbreaks. (U-M News Service press release)
Don't blame the trees
A new analysis by Luis Fernando Chaves, EEB Ph.D. student, Professor Mercedes Pascual and Professor Mark Wilson, suggests that socioeconomic factors, rather than landscape, best explain patterns of at least one disease, American cutaneous Leishmaniasis (ACL). Deforestation may make socially marginalized human populations more, not less, vulnerable to infection. Their results were published in Feb. 6 in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Read the U-M press release.
Kudos to recent grant recipients
The Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute has awarded Professor Mercedes Pascual $196,292 for two years to fund her research on vector-transmitted diseases in a changing world.
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