Melissa Collier, Ph.D. – Postdoctoral Fellow
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 in wildlife. Her work integrates contact networks, mathematical modeling, and meta-analyses of social structures to reveal how contact and animal movement influence pathogen dynamics. She also manages the Animal Social Network Repository, a growing global database of wildlife contact networks designed to enable large-scale comparative analyses.
Melissa earned her Ph.D. in Biology from Georgetown University in 2023, where she investigated the spread of disease in Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins that visit the Potomac–Chesapeake region. While her research is grounded in computational and analytical methods, she also conducts targeted field studies with our local dolphins to collect high-resolution behavioral data that inform and validate her models. Her current work, funded by the Morris Animal Foundation, examines how climate change may alter pathogen transmission in dolphin populations and explores machine learning strategies for more effective disease monitoring in marine mammals.
