Hannah Frank
My research interests lie in understanding the ecological and evolutionary aspects of host-pathogen interactions, in particular in bats. My dissertation research focused on bats in an agricultural landscape in Costa Rica, trying to tease apart the impacts of land use and host ecology on community change, parasitism, and viral and bacterial infection in bats. I showed that land use type not only impacts the bats that are found in various locations but also the patterns of ectoparasitism and bacterial infection. I also showed some ecological patterns in parasitism and both bacterial and viral infections.
In my postdoctoral research in the Boyd Lab (Stanford Dept. of Pathology) I continued a theme I started in my PhD of investigating how bats have evolved in response to infections with a particular focus on host genomes and expanded my inquiry to include the adaptive immune system.
Now as an assistant professor at Tulane, I continue to use field and lab-based inquiries to investigate questions of disease ecology, pathogen-driven selection, molecular evolution and immunology in bats as well as other species.