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VISTA Team

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Angel Desai

Principal Investigator

Angel is an infectious disease specialist offering care for patients with various general infectious disease conditions. She has special clinical interest and expertise in emerging infectious diseases, outbreaks, special pathogens, infection prevention and control, and tropical medicine.
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Simon Anthony

Co-Investigator

Simon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. His research focuses on critical questions surrounding viruses in wildlife and their potential for zoonotic spillover. With VISTA, Simon is our virology expert and is also supporting CEPI’s coronavirus vaccine library working group.
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Jonna Mazet

Senior Advisor

Jonna was the lead for developing the original SpillOver tool, and is the Vice Provost of Grand Challenges and the Chancellor’s Leadership Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology and Disease Ecology at UC Davis, where she founded the One Health Institute. Prof. Mazet is active in global health problem-solving, especially for emerging infectious disease and conservation challenges.
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Nistara Randhawa

Data Scientist

Nistara is the VISTA team’s lead data scientist. Her research entails network modeling of disease epidemics and spatial analyses of viruses. Nistara has a special interest in R programming, and is an affiliate of the UC Davis Data Science Initiative and the R Epidemics Consortium.
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Jianye Ge

Data Scientist

Jianye is the VISTA team’s artificial intelligence (AI) expert and is building our Large Language Model and integrating AI tools for near real-time optimization of our platform’s virus risk rankings.
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Jane Fieldhouse

Postdoctoral Scientist

Jane is our team’s expert helping identify new risk factors for virus rankings and integrating qualitative expert data with the data science team’s artificial intelligence tools.
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Heather Wells

Postdoctoral Scientist

Heather is utilizing her background in mathematics and computer programming to study evolutionary mechanisms associated with the spillover of viruses from wildlife. Together with Simon, Heather provides critical virology expertise and is supporting CEPI’s coronavirus vaccine library working group.
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David Wolking

Project Manager

David is the team’s senior project manager and communications lead. He was formerly the Global Operations lead for the PREDICT project, which developed the original SpillOvers tool. He manages projects with the One Health Institute and is the program manager for Grand Challenges Emerging Health Threats.
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Liz Leasure

Financial Manager

Liz is the Financial Operations Manager based at the One Health Institute.
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Grace Kim

Administrative Assistant

Grace is the team’s administrative assistant supporting all aspects of the project.