Galvani to Receive Young Investigators' Prize from American Society of Naturalists

Yale Assistant Professor Alison Galvani, in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine, will receive a Young Investigators’ Prize from the American Society of Naturalists (ASN).

The ASN is the distinguished society that publishes The American Naturalist, the leading journal in the field of evolutionary ecology. Young Investigators’ Prizes recognize outstanding and promising work of investigators at an early career stage.

Galvani, whose work is in the division of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, will receive her award and present a paper entitled “Epidemiology Meets Evolutionary Ecology” at ASN’s joint meeting with the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biologists, to be held from June 10 to 14 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Her research focuses on how evolutionary forces shape the engagement between infectious agents and the immune system of individual hosts, and, more generally, how evolution affects interactions between the host and parasite at the population level.

She has shown that host and pathogen heterogeneity can have important consequences for many aspects of the epidemiology and evolution of both populations, including the patterns of disease distribution, the intensity of competition between parasite strains, age–dependent profiles of infection intensity, and the evolution of virulence.

Galvani has collaborated with Merck scientists to assess the public health impact of their human papillomavirus vaccine. She has also quantitatively evaluated the mechanism of progression from HIV to AIDS, and determined the historical selective pressures that acted on the HIV resistance allele CCR5–delta 32. Much of this work has direct implications for the potential success of different control policies and for the persistence of disease.