isolated

  Instructor
  Mathematics
  Spelman College, Atlanta, GA



About

I did my PhD is in Applied Math from University of Pittsburgh. I studied spatiotemporal patterns in neural firing rate models, advised by Professor Bard Ermentrout.

I did my first postdoc in biology at Emory University, supervised by Professor Katia Koelle (2017-2020), where I began studying virus-host dynamics.

I did a postdoc in the Weitz lab(2020-2023) at GA Tech in biological sciences. I continued studying the effects of individual variation in virus-host systems – from COVID epidemic dynamics to phage-host dynamics (viruses infecting bacteria). While at GA Tech, I also helped teach the foundations course in Quantitative Biosciences for first-year PhD students, drawing on topics learned in graduate school on computational and mathematical neuroscience.

Before moving into my current position at Spelman College, I held a Visiting Assisant Professor position at Rose-Hulman.


Recent

  • Harris JD, Gallmeier E, Dushoff J, Beckett SJ, Weitz JS (2024). Infections are not alike: the effects of covariation between individual susceptibility and transmissibility on epidemic dynamics. MedRxiv. Preprint (2024)
  • Dominguez-Mirazo M, Harris JD, Demory D, Weitz JS (2024). Accounting for cellular-level variation in lysis: implications for virus–host dynamics. mBio15:e01376-24. Publication (2024)
  • Shi, YT, Harris, JD, Martin, MA, & Koelle, K (2024). Transmission bottleneck size estimation from de novo viral genetic variation. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 41(1), msad286. Publication (2024)


Research


I use math models to study how individual variation effects the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases.


Weitz Lab (2020-2023)

  • epidemic models
    • asymptomatic transmission in COVID-19 using a generation interval framework, Epidemics (2023)
      isolated





      Designed by Audra Davidson


  • virus-microbe dynamics and entanglement problems
    • latent period variability in one-step experiments, ASM (2024) # - phage-host coalitions (eco-evoluationary spatial dyanmics!)
      # isolated




Koelle lab (2017-2020)

  • cell coinfection of influenza A virus




Teaching


Spelman

  • 2 sections of Applied Calc 1 (Fall Semester 2024)
  • Gen Stats 1, Contemporary Math (Fall Semester 2024)

Rose-Hulman

  • Intro to Biomath & 2 sections of Diff Eq 1 (Spring Quarter 2024)
  • Calc 2, 2 sections of Diff Eq 1 (Winter Quarter 2023-24)
  • 2 sections of Diff Eq 1 (Fall Quarter 2023)

Georgia Tech