Sagan Friant
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Diseases that pass from animals to people, a process called spillover, can harm public health and economies worldwide, as COVID-19 showed. Officials often rely on large-scale risk maps that link disease risk to broad factors such as climate, land use and poverty.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Ecology & Evolution
Social Science
- Topics
Lassa fever
Lassa virus
zoonotic spillover
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Measure how human land use shapes the population dynamics, movement and Lassa virus infection of rodent reservoirs, sampling field sites that span broad-scale drivers of Lassa fever risk.
- Identify human behaviors and practices, including those tied to poverty, that create Lassa virus exposure, using participatory activity mapping and ethno-epidemiological research.
- Build interface models linking landscape dynamics, rodent reservoir ecology and human behavior to predict the spatial and temporal distribution of Lassa virus and risky exposures.
- Use model scenarios with communities to evaluate disease control options against competing risks, and integrate local findings into existing regression-based Lassa fever risk maps.
More about the research
These maps rarely capture the local interactions among people, animals and the environment that actually lead to infection, while local field studies are hard to scale up to regional predictions. This project bridges the two scales using Lassa fever, a rodent-borne hemorrhagic fever of public health importance in West Africa and a global health priority.
Why it matters
Lassa fever is a serious rodent-borne disease in West Africa. More accurate, locally grounded risk maps could help health agencies target prevention and prepare for epidemics. Because communities help evaluate interventions, control measures can be weighed against everyday pressures such as food insecurity. The approach could also improve risk prediction for other diseases that jump from animals to people.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Patrick Stephens
Oklahoma State University, OK·Ecology & Evolution
Identify environmental factors (weather, air quality) and socioeconomic factors (physician numbers, vaccine willingness) that explain why Oklahoma counties and metro areas had more or fewer COVID-19 cases than their population size predicted.
Alexander Travis
Cornell University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether community-engaged research that combines weather, land-use, human and animal health, behavior and pathogen genomic data can produce predictive epidemiological models that forecast infectious disease outbreaks.
Alistair Hayden
Cornell University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether the living-evidence model of systematic review — continuously updated rather than one-time literature synthesis — makes infectious disease research products more applicable to real decisions.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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