My name is David Allen. I am an associate professor of biology at Middlebury College. I study forest ecology and the ecology of tick-borne diseases. Here are other places you might want to find me:
I am excited to share an R package and accompanying publication by Myles Stokowski and me. Myles is a recent Middlebury College graduate. The package, IxPopDyMod, allows users to write, run, and analyze tick population and infection dynamics models. We wrote the package to make it easier for tick researchers, who might be novice R users, to have a convenient framework to write tick population dynamics models. The model is completely described in a relatively simple R file which can then be shared. This makes it easier for other researchers to re-run the model or make modifications to it. The package is described in our recent Parasites & Vectors paper. The appendix of that paper gives three extended examples of package use, with R code. It is up on CRAN, so easy to download to R. Finally it has a github page where users can find other examples or post any issues they find with the package. If you have any questions about using the package feel free to reach out to me!
On Sept. 9th I gave a talk on the ecology of ticks and tick-borne diseases at the Henry Sheldon Museum’s “Bug Talks” series. I really enjoyed the opportunity to share and the great questions for the audience! And thanks to Middlebury Community TV for recording the talk and hosting it on their website!
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of attending the VT Disease Ecology Conference at Norwich University. There were a great set of presentations for PIs, graduate students, and undergrads from UVM, Norwich, St. Mike’s, the VT Fish Health Lab, Middlebury, and Dartmouth. This is the fourth year of the conference! The list of talks can be found here. And there was a nice write up by the Norwich University Newsroom here. Thanks to the Vermont Biomedical Research Network for their generous funding of the conference.
I will be giving a talk at the Middlebury College Biology Department seminar. I am really looking forward to sharing my work on ticks and tick-borne disease with the larger Middlebury community. The talk is Feb. 14 from 12:30-1:20pm in McCardell Bicentennial Hall 220. Hope to see you there!
Last year Bill Landesman, Alison Neal, Dagan Loisel, and I formed the Vermont Disease Ecology working group. This is a Vermont Genetics Network-funded group to support the research of its members. For the past two Julys we have had a day-long meeting for our students and us the opportunity to share our work. It is always a fun event, if you are interested in attending in the future please contact me!
Here were the talks from our July 2019 meeting:
June 10-13, 2019 I attended the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases conference at Princeton University. This was my first EEID conference, and I really loved it. Went to some great talks, re-connected with some old friends and colleagues, and met some new ones. I had the great opportunity to give a talk there on the work we are doing. It was titled, “Larval blacklegged tick phenology changes with elevation: implications for Lyme disease.” If you would like to see my slides feel free to contact me!
