Research Interests
Computational Biology, Host-Pathogen Interactions, Population dynamics
Research Description
In most pathogens, epidemiological and evolutionary processes occur on similar time scales due to the large population sizes and short generation times. This makes infectious diseases amenable to study and the interplay of their ecology and evolution particularly relevant for both fundamental biology and applied public health. However, temporal and spatial changes in infectious disease dynamics are difficult to anticipate due to the effects of environmental drivers on the transmission of pathogens and the complex diversity that these microorganisms exhibit. To address these challenges, my research on the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases focuses on the following general questions:
(1) How do demographic and climate factors shape the population dynamics of infectious diseases in space and time? and (2) How does pathogen diversity interact and interfere with public health interventions?
For answering these questions, I use mathematical and computational tools that are applied to different types of time series data from different parts of the world, including Bangladesh and Chile
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Microbiology
Assistant Professor, Statistics
Assistant Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Recent Publications
González Ojeda, I., Palace, S. G., Martinez, P. P., Azarian, T., Grant, L. R., Hammitt, L. L., Hanage, W. P., & Lipsitch, M. (2025). Linkage-based ortholog refinement in bacterial pangenomes with CLARC. Nucleic acids research, 53(12). https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf488
Larsen, S. L., Noor, I., West, H., Chandra, E., Martinez, P. P., & Kraay, A. N. M. (2025). Influence of immune history when choosing a SARS-CoV-2 booster strategy. Scientific reports, 15(1), Article 35640. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-19659-3
Larsen, S. L., Yang, J., Lv, H., Huan, Y. W., Teo, Q. W., Pholcharee, T., Lei, R., Gopal, A. B., Shao, E. K., Talmage, L., Mok, C. K. P., Takahashi, S., Kraay, A. N. M., Wu, N. C., & Martinez, P. P. (2025). Reimagining the serocatalytic model for infectious diseases: A case study of common coronaviruses. Epidemics, 53, Article 100859. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epidem.2025.100859
Kostandova, N., Schluth, C., Arambepola, R., Atuhaire, F., Bérubé, S., Chin, T., Cleary, E., Cortes-Azuero, O., García-Carreras, B., Grantz, K. H., Hitchings, M. D. T., Huang, A. T., Kishore, N., Lai, S., Larsen, S. L., Loisate, S., Martinez, P., Meredith, H. R., Purbey, R., ... Wesolowski, A. (2024). A systematic review of using population-level human mobility data to understand SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Nature communications, 15(1), Article 10504. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-54895-7
Mahmud, A. S., Bhattacharjee, J., Baker, R. E., & Martinez, P. P. (2024). Alarming trends in dengue incidence and mortality in Bangladesh. The Journal of infectious diseases, 229(1), 4-6. Article jiad529. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiad529