Dana M. Hawley

Assistant Professor
E-mail: hawleyd@vt.edu
Telephone: (540) 231-8946

Research Focus:

My research program investigates the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that underlie pathogen susceptibility within and across ecological scales, from single host individuals up to multi-host communities. I currently study disease dynamics in the context of two broad frameworks: 1) genetic and species-level diversity, and 2) environmental and social stressors. I approach disease ecology from a multi-disciplinary perspective in order to understand how individual physiology, population genetic structure, social behavior, community composition, and environmental context all interact to influence host disease response. My current research projects are briefly described below:

1. Social behavior and disease. Social behavior in animals influences many components of individual physiology, including resistance to pathogens. My research examines how variation in foraging and flocking behavior in a common social backyard bird, the house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus), influences an individual’s chance of 1) becoming infected with a common bacterial pathogen and 2) recovering once infected. This line of work merges individual and population scales by viewing social behavior as a crucial link between population phenomena such as density and individual-level physiology and fitness in the presence of selection pressures such as pathogens.
2. Community and landscape approaches to disease ecology. As part of an NSF-funded collaborative research project, we are testing how avian community composition and landscape urbanization influence disease dynamics in multiple avian hosts of a recently emerged bacterial pathogen that causes debilitating conjunctivitis in its hosts (see picture below). The theoretical backbone of this project is a mathematical disease model, but I will be estimating realistic empirical parameters using field and laboratory experiments. This line of research will help to reveal the potential for human-induced changes in animal communities and landscapes to magnify susceptibility to disease outbreaks.
3. Genetic diversity and disease susceptibility. My research to date demonstrated that historical reductions in genetic diversity within an introduced species can compromise host resistance and immune response to a recently emerged pathogen. This line of work will be expanded to multiple hosts and pathogen systems in order to understand the generality of this effect, the mechanisms underlying it, and the ecological scales at which diversity can influence host disease response.
4. Aquatic Toxicology and Disease Susceptibility. Environmental pollutants are well known for their observable harmful effects on natural populations of vertebrates, but the subtle physiological impacts of environmental contamination are often overlooked. I recently joined a collaborative research team that studies the South River basin in VA, which contains unusually high levels of mercury contamination. I’m examining whether mercury contamination influences the health of a diverse avian breeding community across a gradient of polluted and clean rivers.