University of Chicago
Project Title: Crossing Scales to Predict and Prevent Bat Virus Zoonoses in a Madagascar Ecosystem
Award Year: 2022
Biography
Cara Brook is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, where her lab studies the ecology and evolution of zoonotic diseases, with a particular interest in viruses that transmit from wild bats to humans. Cara received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology under the advisorship of Andy Dobson at Princeton University, where she pioneered a longitudinal ecological study investigating the mechanistic dynamics that govern viral transmission in wild fruit bats which are consumed as a source of human food on the island of Madagascar. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Mike Boots at UC Berkeley, supported by a Miller Postdoctoral Fellowship, a L’Oréal-USA For Women in Science Fellowship, and a Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellowship. While a postdoc, Cara used theoretical and in vitro approaches to investigate the evolutionary underpinnings of virulence evolution in zoonotic bat viruses. At the University of Chicago, her lab continues to work in the Madagascar field system that she developed as a graduate student, employing tools from field biology, immunology, virology, and epidemiology to study how zoonotic viruses persist, transmit, and evolve in wild reservoir and spillover human hosts.