Vector Behaviour, Ecology, and Transmission
Dr. Lauren Cator is a Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London. She studies the behaviour of disease transmitting mosquitoes. In the past she has worked on several aspects of mosquito behavioral ecology both in the laboratory and in transmission sites in Tanzania, Thailand, Mexico, and India. Lauren is pictured here with her favourite collaborator and non-work "outputs".
If you are interested in working with Lauren please contact her: l.cator@imperial.ac.uk.
View Lauren's CV
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**She is unbelievably lucky to work with and extremely proud of the colleagues listed below.**
Scott Tytheridgeis excited to be working on a PhD investigating the impact of nectar feeding on vectorial capacity and immunity of Aedes albopictus, co-advised by Arran Folly at APHA. Scott has over five years of academic and contract research experience answering questions on fundamental mosquito biology and ecology. He utilises both field and molecular techniques to improve understanding and inform planning and implementation of mosquito control tools. In Scott’s *occasional* spare time (!), he enjoys baking, swim training, and playing water polo.
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Sarah Kelly is the data curator for the One Health VBDHub. She predominantly focusses on relationship building with data depositors and data wrangling of vector abundance data. For the last 9 years Sarah has worked as part of the VectorBase and ClinEpiDB team at VEuPathDB, curating both entomological and epidemiological data. When she is isn’t curating data you will find her running, swimming and cycling around the coastline and camping on hilltops.
Stanley Modrak is the amazing developer for the One Health VBD Hub Project.
**More coming soon!**
Francis Windram is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the One Health VBD Hub Project in the lab. He predominantly focuses on creating tooling and visualisation for disease vector trait and population data. During his PhD, Francis worked on designing new computational imaging and trait extractions methods for the webs of UK orb-weaving spiders. Aside from science, Francis is also an avid musician, climber, and general nature lover.
Illustrious Alumni
Claudia Wyer (2019-2024) received PhD in spring 2023 through the NERC-funded ‘Scientific Solutions for a Changing Planet’ Doctoral Training Partnership. Her dissertation focussed on the genomic basis of sexual selection in Aedes aegypti. In her past work she has investigated the role of microbiota load in the gut epithelial response in the malaria vector Anopheles coluzzi, and the functional characterisation of genes of the rodent malaria parasite Plasmodium berghei. Claudia is currently conducting research on genes underlying male mating success and post mating responses. Currently she is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. Check out what Claudia is up to https://blogs.cornell.edu/harrington/research/members/.
Paul Huxley's (2016-2021) work seeks to address this gap by investigating functional vector traits, and establishing the extent to which individual variation within populations is influenced by environmental factors, such as changes in temperature and diet. Trait variation may play an important role in determining the ability of mosquitoes, for example, to transmit potentially fatal diseases to humans and wildlife. These research areas are brought together by an overarching interest in contributing to our understanding of global environmental change, and its impacts on human and ecosystem health. Paul is currently working as a post-doc at the Quantitative Ecological Genetics Lab at Virginia Tech starting fall.
Marie Russell (2017-2021) is interested in how ecological factors influence the life history traits of mosquitoes, and how those traits might affect the potential of mosquitoes to transmit pathogens. Since Marie’s past experiences working with mosquitoes (in Atlanta, Georgia and Hilo, Hawaii) were primarily field-based, she also has an interest in optimizing mosquito surveillance methods. Marie’s previous position as a fellow at the US Environmental Protection Agency allowed her to perform data analyses for a wide range of environmental topics including air pollution, combined sewer overflows, perfluorinated compounds, and non-targeted compounds. Marie’s favorite way of analyzing data is currently to use the “tidyverse” in R. Marie is currently working at Iowa State University on West Nile surveillance.
Nichar Gregory (2015-2019) is broadly interested in understanding the mechanistic processes that operate between ecological conditions and outcomes of health relevance. In past work, she has investigated trade-offs in health-related ecosystem services in Brazil, using a dung beetle-faecal parasite system, as well as the role of cockfighting in facilitating Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (H5N1) transmission in Southeast Asia. Her Ph.D. research in Malaysian Borneo explored the impacts of converting lowland tropical forest to oil palm plantation on vector-borne disease risk. She is particularly interested in understanding how mosquito ecology interacts with environmental change to influence risk parameters. Nichar is now a postdoctoral researcher in the EcoHealth Alliance
Andy Aldersley (2016-2019) is (very broadly!) interested in how we can use data to learn about the natural world around us. Currently, his focus is on understanding the how, what, and why of acoustic signalling between mosquitoes. During his PhD at the University of Bristol, Andy spent a large part of his time developing methods to visualise and analyse auditory interactions between pairs and larger groups of mosquitoes, with a view to understanding how sound is used in pre-copulatory and swarm behaviours. He worked with the Cator Lab on a BBSRC project to investigate more deeply the role of acoustics in male mating success of the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, and how this fits in with our wider knowledge of their behavioural ecology.
