Skylar Hopkins
Bio
Research Interests:
I research several questions at the intersection of two fields: disease ecology and conservation biology. I explore how win-win solutions can be used to advance conservation goals while reducing human infectious disease burdens; how we can control or mediate the impacts of parasites and pathogens on sensitive wildlife species; and how we can conserve the thousands of parasite species that might be threatened with extinction due to global change. This work is often highly collaborative, involving other members of the Sustainable Health Ecology Lab (SHEL) and multiple interdisciplinary working groups. Together, we use a variety of methods, including field sampling, laboratory studies, mathematical modeling, and synthesis science, to design and evaluate conservation and health solutions.
Publications
- Drivers of population dynamics of at-risk populations change with pathogen arrival , BIOLOGICAL CONSERVATION (2024)
- Nonrandom foraging and resource distributions affect the relationships between host density, contact rates and parasite transmission , ECOLOGY LETTERS (2024)
- Summer cave use by tricolored bats declined in response to white-nose syndrome despite persistence in winter hibernacula in the southeastern United States , JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY (2024)
- Nature's chefs: Uniting the hidden diversity of food making and preparing species across the tree of life , BioScience (2023)
- New IUCN Species Survival Commission Parasite Specialist Group launched in 2023 , ORYX (2023)
- Environmental Persistence of the World's Most Burdensome Infectious and Parasitic Diseases , Frontiers in Public Health (2022)
- Evidence gaps and diversity among potential win–win solutions for conservation and human infectious disease control , The Lancet Planetary Health (2022)
- Host preferences inhibit transmission from potential superspreader host species , PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES (2022)
- Continued preference for suboptimal habitat reduces bat survival with white-nose syndrome , Nature Communications (2021)
- Schistosome infection in Senegal is associated with different spatial extents of risk and ecological drivers for Schistosoma haematobium and S. mansoni , PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2021)