Steve Bellan, MPH, PhD

Contact Information

Research Interests

Teaching and Training

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Other Publications

Lecture Materials

Camera Trap Videos

Contact Information

Update: I am now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

steve (dot) bellan (at) gmail (dot) com Steve Bellan on dune
PhD. Evironmental Science, Policy & Management, University of California, Berkeley 2012
MPH. Public Health, University of California, Berkeley 2008
B.A. Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University 2006
Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests

Jackal Drawing on a lifelong enthusiasm for animal behavior, I conducted my undergraduate thesis on male mate choice in a fiddler crab in Panama. From this behavioral background, I grew fascinated with how infectious diseases affect wildlife and human communities. As a PhD student in Wayne Getz’s lab at UC Berkeley, I studied the dynamics of infectious diseases in wildlife and in humans from a system’s perspective. I integrate empirical and theoretical tools from ecology and epidemiology to observe, understand, and manage they dynamics of pathogens. I am particularly interested in the use of hierarchical statistical models and dynamic mathematical models to yield more insight from public health and wildlife disease data as well as drive the development of empirical studies.

My dissertation research focused on developing empirical and analytical methods to integrate multiple data sets from several spatiotemporal scales with the intention of estimating anthrax incidence in zebra and other herbivores of Etosha National Park, Namibia. Estimating incidence explicitly in space and time will allow longterm mortality data sets to be used to assess the potential causes and community-wide consequences of this disease. I also study interactions between anthrax with scavengers specifically exploring how anthrax outbreaks affect black-backed jackal movement, foraging decisions, and subsequent implications for rabies virus and canine distemper virus epidemiology in carnivores.

Concurrent with my PhD program, I completed a Masters in Public Health in Epidemiology, focusing on mathematical models of mosquito-borne disease dynamics and their implications the management of malaria, dengue, and chikungunya. Mosquito control interventions may fail because the relationship between mosquito population dynamics and human disease burden is complex and variable between different ecosystems and species. In particular, most current Aedes mosquito control interventions, which aim to reduce dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever disease burdens, have been considered unsuccessful, unsustainable, or both. I am interested in using mathematical models as frameworks in which to examine empirical data on vector control interventions.

Teaching and Training

I am interested in training in public health, epidemiology, conservation biology and biomathematics. I am an organizer of and faculty at the Meaningful Modeling of Epidemiological Data Clinic held annually at the African Institute of Mathematical Scienes (AIMS) in South Africa as well as the Clinic on Dynamical Approaches to Infectious Disease Data held annually at the University of Florida at Gainseville in the United States.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Bellan, SE, K Fiorella, D Melesse, WM Getz, BG Williams, J Dushoff (in press). The role of extra-couple HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa: a mathematical modelling study of survey data. Lancet.

Bellan, SE, O Gimenez, R Choquet, WM Getz (2013). Hierarchical Distance Sampling Approach to Estimating Mortality Rates from Opportunistic Carcass Surveillance Data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. (PDF)

Bellan, SE, JRC Pulliam, JC Scott, J Dushoff and the MMED Organizing Committee (2012). How to make epidemiological training infectious. PLoS Biology 10(4): e1001295. (PDF)

Bellan, SE, CA Cizauskas, J Miyen, K Ebersohn, KC Prager, CT Sabeta, M van Vuren, WM Getz (2012). Black-backed jackal exposure to rabies virus, canine distemper virus, and Bacillus anthracis in Etosha National Park, Namibia. Journal of Wildlife Diseases 48:371-81. (PDF)

Beyer, W, SE Bellan, G Eberle, HH Ganz, WM Getz, R Haumacher, KA Hilss, W Kilian, J Lazak, PCB Turnbull, WC Turner (2012). Distribution and molecular evolution of Bacillus anthracis genotypes in Namibia. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 6: e1534. (PDF)

Tambling, CT, SD Laurence, SE Bellan, EZ Cameron, JT du Toit, WM Getz (2011). Estimating carnivoran diets using a combination of carcass observations and scats from GPS clusters. Journal of Zoology. (PDF)

Bellan, SE (2010). The importance of age dependent mortality and the extrinsic incubation period in models of mosquito-borne disease transmission and control. PLoS ONE 5: e10165. (PDF)

Manuscripts in Review

Bellan, SE, PCB Turnbull, W Beyer, WM Getz. Effects of experimental exclusion of scavengers from anthrax-infected herbivore carcasses on Bacillus anthracis sporulation, survival and distribution. Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Manuscripts in Preparation

Bellan, SE, O Gimenez, R Choquet, O Spiegel, M Trinkel, R Nathan, A Galvani, WM Getz, LA Meyers. A wildlife disease surveillance system using multispecies scavenger movement data.