The Team
Summer 2024, missing Brian
The Team
Summer 2023
The Team
Spring 2022
The Bharti Lab
of Human Infectious Diseases is…
Nita Bharti, PI
Dr. Nita Bharti’s research investigates the interactions between biology and behavior and their interlinked impacts on human health to inform public health and disease intervention strategies.
Dr. Bharti teaches:
Biology 418 The Biology of Human Infectious Disease
PSU 16 Freshman Seminar for Biology Majors
Similoluwa (Simi) Aruwajoye, Graduate Student
Simi is a PhD student in the Ecology program. She holds an MPH and brings experience as an epidemiologist from her time at the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Houston Health Department, and Austin Public Health. She is researching the links between movement and the distribution of human settlements on measles transmission and prevention in the DRC.
Kelsee Baranowski, Postdoctoral Researcher
Kelsee Baranowski is a postdoc in the Biology department studying the ecology of infectious diseases. Her work focuses on identifying the environmental drivers and mechanisms of Hendra virus spillover from Pteropus bats in Australia and Ebola virus in the DRC. She uses GIS and remotely sensed data to assess land cover change with the goal of understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics of wildlife habitat. Kelsee was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow as a graduate student.
Alexandre Blake, Postdoctoral researcher
Alexandre Blake is a postdoc in Biology. He is a French MD, specialized in Public Health, a former medical epidemiologist at Epicentre/Doctors Without Borders, and holds a PhD in Biology. His research focuses on measles and cholera dynamics, spatial heterogeneities in transmission, and the impact of population movements. His projects include analyses of measles dynamics in Niger and the impact of vaccination and human movement on endemic cholera and measles in the DRC.
Brian Lambert, Programmer
Brian Lambert is a programmer who has spent his career assisting scientists in the creation, extension, and scaling of novel research software. His work in the Bharti lab focuses on developing machine learning approaches to assist with foliage classification in satellite imagery, and in deploying deep learning models to cloud computing environments to measure real-time population movements and mixing from heterogenous video sources.
Former lab members
Christina Faust, Postdoctoral researcher
Dr. Faust has a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and has worked on a diversity of pathogen systems, from bird flu to parasitic worms. Her research focuses on understanding mechanisms that alter infectious disease dynamics following anthropogenic landscape change. In 2021, she moved to the University of Glasgow with a prestigious 5-year Independent Research Fellowship from the Natural Environment Resources Council (NERC).
Joy FLowers, Graduate Student
Joy Flowers is a PhD student in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management. She earned a dual B.S. in Wildlife Conservation and Biology at Virginia Tech.
Alexandria Gonzalez, Researcher
Alexandria Gonzalez is a Penn State graduate. She received a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a minor in Spanish. In the Bharti lab, her research analyzed the influence of dynamic road connectivity on the transmission of Ebola virus disease in Central and West Africa. In the fall of 2021, she began medical school at the University of Connecticut.
Behnam Nikparvar, Postdoctoral Reseacher
Dr. Behnam Nikparvar is a Geospatial data scientist. He leverages remotely sensed data, location-based data, and spatiotemporal modeling and analyses to understand the mobility and displacement of human populations. He has worked on population movement following natural and man-made disasters. His Ph.D. research focused on the spatiotemporal modeling of disease spread through micromobility transportation systems. He is also interested in machine learning of data with geospatial properties. In 2024, Dr. Nikparvar moved to Odyssey Logistics.
Teairah Taylor, Undergraduate Student, 2019 BBH
Teairah Taylor was an undergraduate in Biobehavioral Health and a Penn State McNair Scholar. In the Bharti lab, she worked on land use change and deforestation in Australia to understand Hendra virus spillover. After graduating in 2019, she headed to Cornell University with a prestigious McNair Fellowship to pursue her PhD in Health Communication where her work focuses on public health messaging to reduce health disparities.
Bo, founding member
Bo was a founding member of The Bharti Lab. In 2018, he moved on to bigger adventures and now enjoys spacewalks and space naps.
We are laughing.
Group photos by Dan Lesher 2022.