CCDD Alumni

Cheryl completed her postdoc training at CCDD from 2014-2016. She is currently Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Natural Sciences and Mathematics. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER (2019 – 2024) and NIH MIRA (2021 – 2026 and 2026 – 2031). Her lab works on population genomics and evolution of various bacterial pathogenic species that cause bloodstream and foodborne infections, with a focus on recombination and horizontal gene transfer. 

Kate Langwig is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech, and an affiliated faculty of the Global Change Center. Kate completed her B.S. at Union College in 2008, and worked for several years with New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. She completed her Ph.D. in 2015 from the University of California Santa Cruz. Kate was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health from 2015-2017 before joining the faculty at Virginia Tech.

I am a demographer, and am broadly interested in the interplay between human population changes, environmental factors, and infectious disease dynamics. My research draws on theory and methods from demography and disease ecology, to answer questions such as – why do outbreaks occur at certain times of the year? How and why does the mortality burden of infectious diseases vary over time? How do population travel patterns drive the spatial dynamics of outbreaks? How will global environmental and demographic changes alter the landscape of infectious disease burden in the future? I use statistical methods and biologically mechanistic models to answer these questions in the context of multiple diseases in countries in Asia, Africa,