Author: Chelsea Wood

Sara Faiad is on fire!  In the past two weeks, she has been awarded:

1. a UW Graduate School Boeing International Fellowship, which will provide one quarter of support for a research expedition in Madagascar, where Sara will study the transmission of human schistosomiasis;
2. a foundry10 Research Grant, which will support Sara’s laboratory experiments on schistosomiasis here at UW; and
3. a Women Divers Hall of Fame (WDHOF) 20 for 2020 Dive Training Grant, which will allow Sara to get SCUBA certified so that she can pursue research on how behavior mediates the risk of parasitic infection for marine fishes.

Way to go, Sara – we are all so proud of you!

Chelsea was recently interviewed for a Congressional Quarterly report that tackled the question, “can future pandemics be prevented?” You can access the full text of the report here.

Chelsea wrote an article for The Conversation, an online new source devoted to translating academic research for a lay audience!  In it, she summarizes the results of her recent PNAS paper, which shows that drone imagery can facilitate cheap and easy assessment of schistosomiasis risk in West Africa. You can read Chelsea’s article here.

Our new paper out today in PNAS shows that satellite images, drone photos, and even Google Earth could help identify communities most at risk for getting one of the world’s worst tropical diseases – schistosomiasis. Read more in the paper itself, or check out the associated press release and video!

Wood Lab research was recently featured on the Ecology and Evolution blog! To read more about Chelsea’s new approach for manipulating biodiversity at the scale of entire aquatic ecosystems, click here.

We’re excited to announce that Sara Faiad will join the Wood Lab as a PhD student in September 2019!  Sara will join our ongoing NSF-funded project to assess the relationship between host diversity and parasite abundance across an 18-island gradient of human disturbance in the central equatorial Pacific.  We’re all looking forward to your arrival, Sara!

A new paper out in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment describes the potential for natural history collections to serve as sources of information about parasites of the past. The paper was led by museology graduate student Alaina Harmon, who conducted an independent study in the Wood Lab in 2017. The cover art makes us wonder about all the parasites hidden away in those jars…

This week, the Wood Lab’s work on the ecology of schistosomiasis was highlighted in a video by the California Academy of Sciences’ bioGraphic. You can see the video here and read more about the project on our department’s news page or on our website.

We’re excited to announce that Whitney Preisser will join the Wood Lab in September 2019!  Whitney will be working to document long-term change in the diversity of marine parasites, using preserved fish specimens from the UW Ichthyology Collection.  We can’t wait to see what you find out, Whitney!

A recent article in Hakai Magazine discussed long-term change in the abundance of marine parasites, highlighting findings on anisakid nematodes currently being written up by MS students Evan Fiorenza and Catrin Wendt and on Clavinema mariae “blood worm” parasites of English sole, from an already-published manuscript led by former undergrad Ingrid Howard. The original Hakai article has been picked up by other outlets as well.