Mercedes Pascual

Climate and health, Ecology and evolution of infectious diseases, Infectious disease dynamics, Mathematical and computational biology, Theoretical ecology, Vector-borne and water-borne infections, Networks in ecology and evolution, Community ecology

Mercedes Pascual is a Professor in the Departments of Biology and Environmental Studies at New York University, and an external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. A theoretical and computational ecologist, she is interested in the population dynamics of infectious diseases, their response to changing environments and their interplay with pathogen diversity. Her research has combined process-based mathematical models with statistical inference methods for nonlinear and noisy systems, to address the impact of climate variability and climate change on the temporal and spatio-temporal patterns of water-borne and vector-borne infections. Her work has also addressed the interplay of transmission dynamics and pathogen evolution related to immune evasion. She is currently investigating these eco-evolutionary dynamics in hyper-diverse pathogens (of human, plant and microbial hosts) to understand coexistence of large numbers of strains and implications for population resilience. Finally, her work has contributed analyses of the structure of large interaction networks in ecology and epidemiology (describing “who eats whom”, “who infects whom”, “who is protected from whom”), and of the relationship between structure and  stability in the face of environmental perturbations.

Dr. Pascual  received her Ph.D. degree from the joint program of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship for studies at Princeton University, and a Centennial Fellowship in the area of Global and Complex Systems by the James S. McDonnell Foundation for her research at the University of Michigan.  She received the Robert H. MacArthur award from the Ecological Society of America. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology