“The Fulbright Specialist Program gives one opportunities for building deep, more than single dimension relationships with colleagues across countries... It really does change your career and the viewpoints you can bring to your job at home in the United States.”
Fulbright Specialists are using their expertise to address our world’s critical issues, including COVID-19 pandemic responses.
Courtesy of The University of Kansas
Together with his colleagues from the University of Kansas’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Fulbright Specialist alum Dr. Townsend Peterson recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to model the spread of COVID-19 in the United States.
In 2014, Dr. Peterson served as a Fulbright Specialist at Andres Bello University (ABU) in Santiago, Chile where he helped to expand ABU’s budding geographical medicine PhD program by teaching courses and developing a group project for doctoral students that allowed them to apply their new skills to the field.
We spoke with Dr. Peterson to learn more about his niche area of expertise, his research on COVID-19, and how serving as a Fulbright Specialist gave him the opportunity to form lasting relationships with Chilean scientists and researchers that have enriched his work today.
Can you briefly explain your area of expertise?
I am trained as an evolutionary biologist. Over the years, I have come to work in an area called distributional ecology which tries to answer the question: “Why are species where they are and why are species where they are not?” There is a strong connection between public health work and mapping disease risk. Infectious diseases are caused by organisms that respond positively or negatively to their environments. Distributional ecology is the study of how those positive or negative responses translate into different distributional patterns, and these patterns are what translate into public health risks.
You and your colleagues at the University of Kansas (KU) recently received a Rapid Response Research grant from the National Science Foundation to model efforts to control the spread of COVID-19. Can you explain the aim of this research and your role in it?
Folashade Agusto is a mathematical biologist/epidemiologist and a professor with us at KU. She is the only other faculty member in my department who does disease work like me, so we immediately started collaborating to examine tick-borne diseases. We realized that some of the modeling that we had been doing for other diseases was really applicable to COVID-19. Everybody is trying to predict the peak—how high is it, how we flatten it, and how we can delay it.
It is interesting to hear how you were able to find commonalities between your work studying diseases and the current pandemic. Could you give us an example of these models and their application to COVID-19?
Imagine a perfectly ordered society—we stay at home as much as the Governor or President tells us to, we wear masks when we are told to, and if we get infected, we self-isolate or quarantine. You can then create models to see the probability of getting COVID-19 in this scenario.
The really interesting question is then: “What if we don’t trust the system?” My colleague Folashade has developed models to see the difference it makes in the height and the timing of the peak if people behave perfectly versus if they don’t.
The second stage is to explore what happens if different geographic entities—counties and states—use different criteria, particularly if some have borders within metropolitan areas. For example, Kansas City is half in Kansas and half in Missouri and there are three counties on the Kansas side that actually have different COVID policies. This is where I can be a little more helpful to bring in the geography side. We’re essentially going to create different models corresponding to different counties to see how they all link together to answer, “What happens when we don’t have a coordinated response?” It doesn’t mean that everybody has to lock down at the same time and have the same rules. However, you could imagine a single set of criteria and states graduating into and out of different risk categories and behavioral restrictions.
Is this the first pandemic/epidemic you have applied your expertise to?
There have not been many officially declared pandemics. However, during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, my colleagues and I developed models of where Ebola could break. The other one was H5N1, the Avian Influenza, which hit very hard in East Asia and parts of Europe and Africa. We were very involved in the monitoring of wild bird populations and the connections between migratory birds in Eurasia and North America. We were closely involved with mapping migratory bird movement to explore where H1N1 could jump from East Asia to North America.
Can you please tell us a little about how you applied your interdisciplinary expertise as a Fulbright Specialist at Andres Bello University in Chile? What were the university’s objectives and what was accomplished during your four weeks there?
I taught a two-week course on infectious disease modeling and worked intensively with a small set of students because ABU was just launching its doctoral program in geographic medicine. A group of about 10 to 12 students and I worked together to create a group project where we explored the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS), a respiratory disease transmitted by rodents, and analyzed the transmissions in North and South America. I really enjoyed the process of melding research with graduate education and it allowed the students to build a base of experience with disease geography.
We often hear from alumni that one of the most meaningful elements of serving as a Fulbright Specialist are the relationships with colleagues or other students at their host institution as a result of their project. Have you been able to stay connected with colleagues or students at ABU?
Yes, the relationship I formed with Luis Escobar was nothing short of transformational. He was the person who invited me to ABU and was a doctoral student in geographic medicine at the time. He became a life-long friend and colleague.
What have you learned from your colleagues in Chile, and how has your experience influenced your research and teaching here in the United States?
I have become very interested in a teaching pedagogy called “participatory teaching” where I build courses around group projects the way I did with the doctoral students at ABU. It’s a way for students to apply their learning to real-life examples.
The Fulbright Specialist Program gives one opportunities for building deep, more than single dimension relationships with colleagues across countries. It is a huge positive. I was able to build some relationships that I would not have otherwise been able to build. Fulbright is a great way to get academics to do these international experiences. It really does change your career and the viewpoints you can bring to your job at home in the United States.