The Team

Nita Bharti, PI

Dr. Nita Bharti’s work focuses on the interactions between biology and behavior and their interlinked impacts on human health to inform public health and disease intervention strategies.

Dr. Bharti teaches:
Biology 418 The Biology of Human Infectious Disease
PSU 16 Freshman Seminar for Biology Majors

Similoluwa (Simi) Aruwajoye, Graduate Student

Simi is a PhD student in the Ecology program. She holds an MPH and brings experience as an epidemiologist from her time at the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Houston Health Department, and Austin Public Health.

Kelsee Baranowski, Postdoctoral Researcher

Kelsee Baranowski is a postdoc in the Biology department studying the ecology of infectious diseases. Her work focuses on identifying the environmental drivers and mechanisms of Hendra virus spillover from Pteropus bats in Australia and Ebola virus in the DRC. She uses GIS and remotely sensed data to assess land cover change with the goal of understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics of wildlife habitat. Kelsee was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow as a graduate student.

Alexandre Blake, Postdoctoral researcher

Alexandre Blake is a postdoc in Biology. He is a French MD, specialized in Public Health, a former medical epidemiologist at Epicentre/Doctors Without Borders, and holds a PhD in Biology. His research focuses on measles and cholera dynamics, spatial heterogeneities in transmission, and the impact of population movements. His projects include analyses of measles dynamics in Niger and the impact of vaccination and human movement on endemic cholera in the DRC.

Joy FLowers, Graduate Student

Joy Flowers is a PhD student in the Biology department. She earned a dual B.S. in Wildlife Conservation and Biology at Virginia Tech. Her current research focuses on analyzing landscape dynamics and creating spatiotemporal models to understand the pathogen-host-environment interactions that lead to high-risk situations for Ebola virus spillover in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Brian Lambert, Programmer

Brian Lambert is a programmer who has spent his career assisting scientists in the creation, extension, and scaling of novel research software. His work in the Bharti lab focuses on developing machine learning approaches to assist with foliage classification in satellite imagery, and in deploying deep learning models to cloud computing environments to measure real-time population movements and mixing from heterogenous video sources.

Behnam Nikparvar, Postdoctoral Scholar

Dr. Behnam Nikparvar is a Geospatial data scientist. He leverages remotely sensed data, location-based data, and spatiotemporal modeling and analyses to understand the mobility and displacement of human populations. He has worked on population movement following natural and man-made disasters. His Ph.D. research focused on the spatiotemporal modeling of disease spread through micromobility transportation systems. He is also interested in machine learning of data with geospatial properties. Currently, Dr. Nikparvar is working on the links between population mobility and the transmission of respiratory viruses.