BIO5 Institute

Dr. Salvador’s work is multidisciplinary and focuses on the quantitative epidemiology and evolutionary dynamics of zoonotic diseases under the One Health umbrella. In particular, her research focuses on developing quantitative approaches to understand the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases at the wildlife, livestock and human interface and across different environments. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Animal & Comparative Biomedical Sciences at the University of Arizona, a Scialog Fellow within the emphasis of ‘Mitigating Zoonotic Threats’ at the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and serves as the Secretary of the Zoonotic Disease Subsection of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Health.

Research Interest

The Computational Zoonosis lab takes an integrative and multidisciplinary One Health approach to develop computational and data-driven models for bacterial pathogens. In doing so, the lab identifies the epidemiological, ecological, and evolutionary drivers involved in bacterial spillover events, amplification, and spread. Such approaches are essential for prioritizing surveillance strategies and predicting future disease emergence risk. At the core of the lab’s program is the curiosity to understand how interactions among individual organism’s scale to population-level dynamics. Current projects and collaborations focus on 1) studying the evolutionary processes and cross-species transmission patterns of zoonotic diseases; 2) connecting the evolutionary dynamics of infectious diseases with ecological through the characterization of underlying spatial and genetic patterns; 3) unraveling genomic signatures of host-pathogen interactions; and 4) developing computational tools to integrate genomic, epidemiological, and ecological data.

Dr. Salvador earned a B.Sc and a M.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Porto, and a Ph.D in Biology from the University of Lisbon, under the PhD Program in Computational Biology (collaboration between the Gulbenkian Institute of Science and Princeton University). Dr. Salvador did postdoctoral work in veterinary epidemiology and data science at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia jointly appointed in the Department of Infectious Diseases in the College of Veterinary Medicine and in the Institute of Bioinformatics.