Miran Park

Title

PhD student
UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Education

BS, Biophysics, University of California, Davis,

Office

4000 Terasaki Life Sciences Building
(310) 206-8203

Email

miran.park@ucla.edu

Personal website

Pathogen emergence is a complex combination of ecological drivers and evolutionary adaptation to a novel environment, and although it is a major public health issue, little is understood about the evolutionary dynamics of emerging diseases. Though we are beginning to understand some of the biological processes involved, the evolutionary mechanisms of emerging diseases are still not well-understood. My work focuses on this process of adaptation across scales of selection to address the hierarchical nature of selection acting at within-host and between-host scales of emerging pathogens. Current efforts include the use of stochastic process frameworks as well as population genetic theory in order to capture these mechanisms and explore outcomes; future work will focus on detailed within-host simulation and assessment of empirical studies of fitness at multiple scales.

Park, M., Loverdo, C., Schreiber, S.J., Lloyd-Smith, J.O. (In review) Multiple scales of selection influence the evolutionary emergence of novel pathogens. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B.

Loverdo, C., Park, M., Schreiber, S.J., Lloyd-Smith, J.O. (2012) Influence of viral replication mechanisms on within-host evolutionary dynamics. Evolution.

Schraiber, J.G., Kaczymarczyk, A.N., Kwok, R., Park, M., Silverstein, R., Rutaganira, F.U., Aggarwal, T., Schwemmer, M.A., Hom, C.L., Grosberg, R.K., Schreiber, S.J. (2012) Constraints on the use of life-shortening Wolbachia to control dengue fever. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 297: 26-32.