Faculty

Afsar Ali, Ph.D. was born and raised in Bangladesh where he obtained his BS in Soil Microbiology and MS in Microbiology with honors from University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Following his academic achievement, he joined in International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR, B), a world class research Institution in the world involving research on diarrheal pathogens.

In 1990, Dr. Ali was accepted as a graduate student with full scholarship in the Department of Microbiology in the University of Microbiology where he obtained MS in Enteric Microbiology. He then obtained his Ph.D. in molecular biology/biotechnology from Marine-Estuarine-Environmental Sciences (MEES) program from the same University. Later, He joined as an Instructor in the department of epidemiology in the school of Medicine in the University of Maryland at Baltimore where he was later promoted to Assistant Professor. On July 1, 2008, Dr. Ali moved to University of Florida where he has been working as a Research Associate Professor in the department of environmental and global Health in the School of Public Health and Health Professions (PHHP), and in Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI).

Dr. Ali’s research work has resulted in many publications published in diverse peer reviewed journals, including Science, Nature Microbiology, mBIO, Emerging Infectious diseases (EID), Nature Scientific reports and ASM journals.

Dr. Benjamin Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental and Global Health, which is also where he received his MPH and PhD in Public Health (One Health). His research experience and expertise includes emerging infectious diseases, zoonotic diseases, and viral respiratory pathogens with a strong focus on zoonotic viruses. He has considerable laboratory experience at BSL-1 to BSL-3+ environments using serological and molecular diagnostic techniques, and has worked extensively in multiple countries on epidemiology studies looking at infectious disease transmission and persistence among humans, animals, and their environment across different animal agriculture settings. His current work focuses on the optimization of bioaerosol and other novel sampling technologies for the detection of emerging viruses in infectious disease hot spots and among vulnerable populations with intense contact with animal reservoirs. In addition to his epidemiological research, Dr. Anderson has a strong passion for global health and scientific research capacity building. This includes the development of new collaborative international research networks and laboratory infrastructure.

Jennifer W. Applebaum, MS, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental & Global Health at the University of Florida’s College of Public Health and Health Professions. Trained as a Medical Sociologist with a background in animal sheltering, Dr. Applebaum’s research focuses, broadly, on the implications of social inequalities on human and companion animal health and well-being. Drawing from sociological theory and concepts to take a social approach to the One Health framework, her research is interested in the intersection of stress, structural-level social processes, the social determinants of health, and the human-animal bond.

Tracie R. Baker (DVM, PhD) has substantial academic training and research in developmental biology, environmental toxicology, genetics, and animal health. Her academic training has been multidisciplinary in nature with an interest in toxicology beginning as an undergraduate where she investigated water pollution effects and behavioral ecology. She earned her Master of Science at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks in marine biology. After earning her DVM (University of Wisconsin – Madison) and a certificate in fish health medicine from the State of Wisconsin, she was an assistant researcher investigating clinical improvements in fish medicine before accepting an NIEHS-funded postdoctoral position that evolved into a PhD program at UW – Madison where her research was the first to show transgenerational inheritance of disease using a zebrafish model. In 2013, she competed successfully for an NIH K01 award through the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). Dr. Baker found that low level, dioxin-induced decreased fertility across multiple generations following early developmental exposure is mediated through the male germline. In 2016, She started her laboratory at Wayne State University (WSU) as an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Department of Pharmacology – School of Medicine, where she still conducts contaminant research in water and fish in the Great Lake region. In 2021, Dr. Baker joined the faculty at the University of Florida and continues to focus on One Health research evaluating developmentally-based and transgenerational, environmentally-induced disease of endocrine disrupting chemicals and contaminants of emerging concern. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her wife, kids, and their dogs, participating in open water swim events and triathlons, traveling, and being outside.

Dr. Joseph Bisesi is an Associate Professor of the Department of Environmental and Global Health and a member of the Center for Environmental and Human Toxicology and the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Biological Sciences, and his Ph.D. in Environmental Toxicology from Clemson University in 2005, 2007, and 2011, respectively. He then completed his post-doc at the University of Florida, where he studied molecular toxicology. Dr. Bisesi then joined the Department of Environmental and Global Health in 2014. In addition to his teaching and research program, Dr. Bisesi currently serves as the program director for the departmental Ph.D. programs.

Dr. Bisesi’s training is grounded in environmental toxicology with a focus on studying the effects of waterborne toxicants in humans and aquatic organisms. His dissertation research was focused on understanding the impacts of antidepressants on the brain biochemistry and feeding behavior of aquatic organisms. Additional training in the examination of molecular mechanisms of toxicants in mammalian and fish models allows Dr. Bisesi to work across human health toxicology and ecotoxicology to address complex public and environmental health issues related to environmental contaminants. Dr. Bisesi’s current research program is focused on elucidating the effects and toxic mechanisms of numerous emerging contaminates, including nanomaterials, plasticizers, and pharmaceuticals as well as legacy contaminants of concern including pesticides and heavy metals. Much of his research is focused on the gastrointestinal system, which is an understudied target of chemical contaminants. His research has been published in numerous high impact environmental journals including Environmental Science and Technology, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, and Environmental Science: Nano. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Bisesi current projects include: probing the contributions of phthalate plasticizers to the obesity epidemic using zebrafish as a model, examining the desorption behavior of pharmaceuticals and pesticides bound to carbon nanomaterials in fish gastrointestinal systems, and exploring the impacts of heavy metals to aquatic organisms under varying pulsed exposure and water quality conditions, and examining the presence and impacts of environmental toxicants in developing countries including Haiti and Zambia.

Amy Blue, PhD, is the associate vice president for interprofessional education in the UF Health Office of the Senior Vice President for Health Affairs. She is also a clinical professor in the College of Public Health and Health Professions’ Department of Environmental and Global Health. Dr. Blue holds a doctorate in Medical Anthropology from Case Western Reserve University and completed a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Post-doctoral fellowship in Behavioral Science at the University of Kentucky. Following completion of her fellowship, she joined the University of Kentucky College of Medicine Dean’s Office and Department of Surgery as an assistant professor and medical educator. In 1998, Dr. Blue moved to the Medical University of South Carolina where she served as the Associate Dean for Curriculum and Evaluation in the MUSC College of Medicine, and advanced to Professor, Family Medicine. In 2007, Dr. Blue was promoted to Assistant Provost for Education at MUSC. In that role, she established and directed the university’s interprofessional education program, Creating Collaborative Care. Dr. Blue has co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications regarding medical and interprofessional education. Her educational research interests have included measures of professionalism in medical students, funded by the National Board of Medical Examiners, and assessment and evaluation practices, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has served in national leadership roles, including chair of The Generalists in Medical Education, chair of the Southern Group on Educational Affairs of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and was a founding member of the American Interprofessional Health Collaborative. Dr. Blue has been elected as a faculty member to the medical honor society, Alpha Omega Alpha, holds honorary membership to the National Pharmacy Leadership Society, Phi Lambda Sigma, and membership to the public health honorary society, Delta Omega. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Interprofessional Care and the Journal of Interprofessional Education and Practice. Dr. Blue served as a member of the Interprofessional Education Collaborative Expert Panel that wrote the Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice Report in 2011. In 2013, she was elected Distinguished Scholar and Fellow in the National Academies of Practice, Dentistry Academy. In 2018, she was awarded the Association of American Medical Colleges Southern Group on Educational Affairs Career Educator award for sustained excellence in educational leadership and scholarship. Most recently, she was selected to be a public member of the National Board of Certification in Occupational Therapy.

José Félix Colón Burgos is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Environmental and Global Health at the University of Florida’s College of Public Health and Health Professions. José completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Cayey campus, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Community Mental Health and a minor in Sociology. He continued his graduate studies at the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Puerto Rico, Health Sciences campus, where he earned a Master’s in Science in Health Systems Research and Evaluation and a doctorate in Public Health specializing in studying the Social Determinants of Health. After his fieldwork in the Dominican Republic studying post-deportation and health, José completed two Postdoctoral fellowships at Florida International University at the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC) and the Center for Research on US Latino HIV/AIDS and Drug Abuse (CRUSADA).

José Félix has worked as a research evaluator with various community, state, and international organizations aiming to tackle social and public health problems from a social justice perspective. His research interests include the study of the social determinants of health and the social determination of health, the effects of inequality and social structures in health, maternal and child health, substance abuse, and sexual risk behaviors, access to health services, and the study of the political economy of health. José incorporates social theory, critical medical anthropology, and critical public health with ethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative research techniques to explore the pathways of health risk in socially marginalized populations.

I am an environmental toxicologist with a biological and analytical chemistry background. I am broadly interested in how low-dose chronic environmental exposures to real and complex chemical mixtures affect ecosystem and human health. My key focuses are on analytical method development as well as understanding the occurrence, fate, transport, toxicity, and risk of emerging and legacy contaminant mixtures within both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.

My research program focuses on environmental and public health issues involving the human interface with aquatic and marine systems. Transdisciplinary collaboration and a community-based approach facilitate examination contaminant and water quality stressors on biota and host/pathogen interactions. Recent efforts have focused on behavioral toxicology, seafood safety in the Gulf of Mexico following DWH, oyster resource restoration and community-based science in Gulf coast communities, and health and safety of Gulf seafood workers. Additional interests include coastal oyster and clam aquaculture, water conservation and reuse, environmental reservoirs of non-tuberculous mycobacteria, teaching and scientific communication.

John Lednicky has BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Microbiology. After graduation with a BS degree, he worked as a clinical microbiology technician and attained two professional certifications: M(ASCP) and RM(NRCM). For both certifications, his specialty areas were in bacteriology and mycology. Thereafter, he worked with Staphylococcus aureus for his MS degree, and had planned on pursuing a PhD in biochemical physics. Instead, he studied transcription regulation by transcription factor SP1 in a macaque polyomavirus (SV40) model for his PhD work.

Prior to joining the University of Florida, Dr. Lednicky was an assistant professor of pathology at the Loyola Medical Center in Illinois. He then worked in industry, where he engaged in biodefense-related work, aerobiology related to inhalation exposure studies in small animal models, various projects with avian influenza H5N1 and other influenza viruses, and the production of biodiesel from alga.

Dr. Lednicky’s current research focus areas at UF are: (a) aerovirology, (b) virus discovery, (c) virus surveillance with emphasis on arthropod-borne viruses, and (d) influenza virus studies. His laboratory discovered Rhinovirus C-51 and a unique variant of Human polyomavirus 9, and was the first to detect Zika and Mayaro viruses in Haitians. More recently, his laboratory was the first in the world to discover Madariaga and Keystone viruses in humans. His laboratory is also involved with the isolation of viruses that are causing lethal infections in farmed deer of Florida. Since January of 2020, a major thrust has been work related to COVID-19. His laboratory is isolating SARS-CoV-2 from humans and the environment, and he has posted a few full-genome sequences of these viruses in GenBank.

Dr. Zhoumeng Lin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Global Health at College of Public Health and Health Professions at the University of Florida. He has joint appointments in Department of Pharmaceutics at College of Pharmacy and Department of Physiological Sciences in College of Veterinary Medicine. He is a member of the Center for Environmental and Human Toxicology (CEHT) and the Center for Pharmacometrics and Systems Pharmacology (CPSP). He received a B.Med. in Preventive Medicine from Southern Medical University in China in 2009 and a Ph.D. in Toxicology from the University of Georgia in 2013. He completed his postdoctoral training in the Institute of Computational Comparative Medicine at Kansas State University in 2016. He was an Assistant Professor from 2016 to 2021 and then an Associate Professor from March to May 2021 at Kansas State University, prior to joining the University of Florida as an Associate Professor in May 2021.

Dr. Lin’s research is focused on the development and application of computational technologies, especially physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence approaches, to study nanomedicine, food safety, nanoparticle and chemical risk assessment. He is a co-author of more than eighty peer-reviewed publications. His publications have received several awards, including the Society of Toxicology Biological Modeling Specialty Section Best Paper Award in 2020 and 2022.

Dr. Lin teaches a graduate level course on PBPK modeling every year. He is a co-editor and a co-author of five chapters of the textbook entitled “Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic (PBPK) Modeling: Methods and Applications in Toxicology and Risk Assessment”.

Dr. Lin has served as an ad hoc grant reviewer for several agencies, including USDA and NIH. He is an ad hoc member of the Science Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC) of US EPA. He has served as an external reviewer on several risk assessment documents on different environmental chemicals for different agencies, including EPA, CDC, and FDA. He has been a member of Society of Toxicology since 2011. He served as a Sunday Host Mentor for the Sunday Undergraduate Education Program organized by the Committee on Diversity Initiatives of Society of Toxicology from 2016 to 2017 and he was a Secretary/Treasurer of Central States Society of Toxicology (CSSOT) from 2018 to 2020. He is now the Vice President of the Biological Modeling Specialty Section (BMSS) and a Councilor of the Nanoscience and Advanced Materials Specialty Section (NAMSS) of Society of Toxicology.

Anthony T. Maurelli, Ph.D. is Professor of Environmental and Global Health. He received a B.S. in Biology from Villanova University, Villanova, PA in May 1974 and a Ph.D. in Molecular Cell Biology in June 1983, from the University of Alabama in Birmingham, Birmingham, AL under the direction of Dr. Roy Curtiss III. After his Ph.D. work, Dr. Maurelli spent three years as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Chargé de Recherche with Prof. Philippe Sansonetti in the Service des Entérobactéries at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France.

In 1986, Dr. Maurelli accepted a position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology, F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD. He was promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure) in 1992 and then to Professor in 1999. He held joint appointments as graduate faculty in the Molecular and Cell Biology and Emerging Infectious Diseases Graduate programs. Dr. Maurelli joined the Department of Environmental and Global Health, College of Public Health and Health Professions, and the Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI), University of Florida in January 2016. He is also affiliate graduate faculty of the Molecular Genetics and Microbiology Department of the University of Florida College of Medicine.

Dr. Maurelli is an elected Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Academy of Microbiology. He has served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Chlamydia Basic Research Society and Mini-reviews Editor for Infection and Immunity. Dr. Maurelli directs an active, NIH-funded basic research program in his laboratory at the EPI in Gainesville . He has had continuous funding from the NIH for over 25 years.

Sarah L. McKune, MPH, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and currently the Interim Chair of the Department of Environmental and Global Health. She is jointly appointed between EGH and the Center for African Studies. She holds a B.A. in French and Sociology from Wofford College and earned a Master’s in Public Health from Emory University in 2002. She completed a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Ecology at the University of Florida’s School for Natural Resources and the Environment in 2012 and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow for a collaborative effort between UF and the CGIAR’s collaborative research program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS).

In 2013, Dr. McKune joined PHHP as the Director of Public Health Programs, overseeing the campus and online MPH and Public Health Certificate programs for the College. In 2016, she joined UF’s Department of Environmental and Global Health in a joint appointment with the Center for African Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She is affiliate faculty in the School for Natural Resources and the Environment and advises students from a variety of units across campus, including Sustainable Development, Anthropology, Food and Resource Economics, Medical Geography, Animal Sciences, Social Behavioral Sciences, and Sociology, as well as those operated by EGH, including Public Health and One Health.

Dr. Nelson is a pediatric hospitalist and sees patients at UF Health Shands Children’s Hospital. Board-certified in pediatrics, Dr. Nelson earned his medical degree from Tufts University. He then completed a pediatric residency at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University followed by a pediatric global health fellowship from Stanford. 

Dr. Nelson is currently on faculty at the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute and is an Assistant Professor with the UF Department of Pediatrics. Prior to joining UF in 2016, Dr. Nelson served as Pediatric Global Health Physician Scientist and Instructor for the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Stanford University.

Dr. Nelson enjoys spending time with his family, playing the cello, sailing and playing soccer.