Webinar Details
Speaker: Pilar Fernandez, Ph.D.
Date: Friday, July 24, 2026
Time: 1:00–2:00 p.m. EDT
Topic: Building the human behavioral landscape to assess tick-borne disease risk
Abstract
Human behavior determines where and when people encounter ticks, yet it is often poorly represented in risk assessments. This talk introduces the human behavioral landscape as the spatial and temporal pattern of movement, activities, protective behaviors, and responses to perceived risk. By integrating smartphone mobility, activity logs, household characteristics, and environmental tick data, this framework can identify individual exposure profiles and improve spatially explicit estimates of tick-borne disease risk.
Bio
Dr. Pilar Fernandez is an Assistant Professor at Washington State University’s Paul G. Allen School for Global Health. She is a disease ecologist whose research examines how human behavior, animal movement, and environmental change shape exposure to vector-borne and zoonotic diseases. Her work integrates spatial epidemiology, movement data, ecological field studies, mobile health tools, and mathematical modeling to improve disease surveillance and prevention through a One Health framework.