Dr. Melissa Collier is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Shweta Bansal’s Lab, where she develops and applies quantitative tools to understand how behavior shapes disease transmission and evolution. Her work integrates contact networks, mathematical modeling, and meta-analyses of social structures to reveal how contact and movement influence pathogen dynamics. Melissa earned her Ph.D. in Biology from Georgetown University in 2023, and her previous postdoctoral work in the Bansal Lab examined how climate change may alter pathogen transmission, and explored machine learning strategies for more effective disease monitoring in marine mammals.
