Courtney A.C. Coon

Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa under the mentorship of Professor Darryn Knobel and Dr. Anna Jolles. My research is focused on the development of qualitative models to compare relative risk of seasonal pathogen transmission between wild African buffalo inside of Kruger National Park and domestic cattle just outside of the park boundary in the Mnisi Community Project. With such models of relative risk, more effective and efficient disease control methods can be developed. My research interests lie generally in the evolution and maintenance of physiological variation, specifically, in infection and disease susceptibility and response.

As a PhD student I worked with Lynn Martin at the University of South Florida in the Department of Integrative Biology, I studied host-parasite interactions, host physiology, and behavior in one of the world’s most widely-distributed vertebrates, the house sparrow, in order to determine whether it utilized parasites as weapons against native competitors thereby facilitating introduction success.

Blood smears created in the field from birds in Kenya were used to detect avian blood parasites.

Setting up a mist-net to catch house sparrows

Explaining my research project to interested members of the public at a field site in Kenya

One of my favorite bird species, the red-cheeked Cordon Bleu, caught while mist-netting for house sparrows in Kenya.