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Fields of study
Theoretical ecology – disease ecology
Academic background
I received my Ph.D degree in 1995 from the Joint Program of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship for studies at Princeton, and more recently, a Centennial Fellowship in Global and Complex Systems from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. I am currently affiliated with the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at UM and with the Santa Fe Institute as an external faculty.
Graduate students
Luis Fernando Chaves, Sarah Cobey, Diego Ruiz-Moreno, Yan Yancy Lo
Postdoctoral fellow
Katia Koelle
News
Pascual appointed HHMI investigator
Professor Mercedes Pascual has been appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. The $600 million initiative from one of the world’s largest private philanthropies will fund 56 of America’s most innovative scientists.
Pascual builds mathematical models to help identify when and how cholera, malaria and other diseases might become epidemics. This will enable public health agencies to prepare for or possibly prevent, life-threatening outbreaks. (U-M News Service press release)
Don't blame the trees
A new analysis by Luis Fernando Chaves, EEB Ph.D. student, Professor Mercedes Pascual and Professor Mark Wilson, suggests that socioeconomic factors, rather than landscape, best explain patterns of at least one disease, American cutaneous Leishmaniasis (ACL). Deforestation may make socially marginalized human populations more, not less, vulnerable to infection. Their results were published in Feb. 6 in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Read the U-M press release.
Kudos to recent grant recipients
The Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute has awarded Professor Mercedes Pascual $196,292 for two years to fund her research on vector-transmitted diseases in a changing world.
Wild weather, changing climate
With politicians discussing global warming legislation, and weather behaving erratically across the nation, climate change suddenly seems to be hot news. But around the U-M campus, scientists have been probing the complexities and consequences of changing climate for decades.
The research of EEB Professors Mercedes Pascual and Philip Myers is featured in a new exhibit "Climate Change: Local impacts, global responsibility" in the Museum of Natural History rotunda, along with the work of eight other U-M scientists. Pascual and her collaborators in Barcelona and Bangladesh found evidence that a phenomenon called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation -- a major source of climate variability from year to year -- influences cycles of cholera in Bangladesh.
Myers of the Museum of Zoology, has shown that over the past 20 years, in response to climate change, species of mammals that once lived only in Michigan's Lower Peninsula and the southern portion of the Upper Peninsula are expanding their ranges farther north, while northern species are disappearing from all but the most northerly reaches of their ranges in the state.
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