College of Agriculture & Natural Resources Department of Fisheries and Wildlife

Biography: Dr. Nicholas Skaff is an Environmental Public Health Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Working with the Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, he applies principles of ecology, epidemiology, and data science to assess spatial and temporal patterns in human health issues arising from environmental factors. He is particularly passionate about developing machine learning models that can identify and forecast important health crises and creating compelling data visualizations to communicate findings that support public health actions. Nick received his PhD from the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife (FW) at Michigan State University. His dissertation research assessed the combined effects of extreme climate events and land cover on mosquito-borne disease transmission. Later, as a postdoc in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, he applied machine learning methods to understand the environmental drivers of West Nile virus transmission in California. Nick is also interested in research that broadly addresses urgent environmental concerns and collaborates with the FW Data-Intensive Landscape Limnology Lab and the Global Lakes Ecological Observatory Network to better understand anthropogenic threats to freshwaters at national and global scales.