Affiliate Faculty are distinguished scholars who are not on the regular faculty but who participate in the life of the department and contribute to the education of our students. They bring a wealth of experience and expertise to the department, and they enrich our students’ education by providing them with exposure to different perspectives and approaches to research. Here is our list of Affiliate Faculty:
“Dr. Colin Carlson is a global change biologist studying the relationship between global climate change, biodiversity loss, and emerging infectious diseases. His research program focuses on statistical methods for measuring and forecasting the global distribution and burden of neglected diseases (including anthrax, Zika virus, and helminthiases). As an ecologist, he is also broadly interested in questions about the dynamics and diversity of disease in wildlife; most recently, his work has focused on how to quantify the global biodiversity of parasites. Dr. Carlson is an advocate for open, reproducible, collaborative science, and frequently produces open-source software in addition to peer-reviewed work in ecology, epidemiology, and global health.
Dr. Carlson holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socioenvironmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University in the Department of Biology.”
Rebecca R. Helm is a marine ecologist who studies life in the open ocean. Her research focuses on the ecology of the high seas, and how biodiversity on this ‘other half’ of Earth is impacted by human activity. She has authored publications in scientific journals like Science, PLOS Biology, and Marine Biodiversity. She is also active in science outreach, is a Templeton Foundation Beyond the Ivory Tower fellow, and her reporting has appeared in outlets including The Atlantic, Slate, and BioGraphic. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Brown University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Before joining Georgetown, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Earth Commons Institute at Georgetown.
