Title: Assistant Professor
College: Liberal Arts and Sciences, Geography Department
Research Interests: GIS, remote sensing, spatial analysis, environmental modeling, malaria
Curriculum vitae: PDF
Hobbies: Football (“soccer”), cycling, hiking, tennis, swimming and occasional amateur dramatics
Dr. Tatem studies how local, regional and global patterns of human movement affect the movement of pests, pathogens and vector species, such as imported malaria and disease-carrying invasive mosquitoes. He is trained in remote sensing techniques, GIS, spatial analysis and environmental modeling. He also researches the application of satellite-imagery based solutions to public health problems and the optimization of population and urbanization mapping for malaria burden estimation.
He is interested in how the increasing mobility of humans and growth in global trade are reducing geographical barriers to the movement of pathogens and exotic species. The recent growth in availability of detailed spatial datasets on climate, population, transport networks and species distributions, combined with sophisticated spatial analysis tools, means that hypotheses on, for instance, exotic species dispersal and vector-borne disease spread can be tested for the first time. Tatem also plans to explore interdisciplinary links through the application molecular epidemiology and spatial demographic tools and datasets.
At EPI, Tatem plans to continue his work with the Malaria Atlas Project by examining approaches to quantifying human movement patterns, as part of a $1.5 million Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant with Dr. David Smith aimed at developing spatial tools for local malaria elimination planning. Cell phone records, seasonal satellite imagery and microcensus records are all being used in an effort to explore novel approaches to quantifying human and malaria infection movements in low transmission regions.
He came to EPI after several years of work at the University of Oxford’s Spatial Ecology and Epidemiology Group in the department of zoology. Tatem is also a research associate at the Centre for Geographic Medicine in Nairobi, Kenya. His doctoral research focused on developing novel land cover mapping techniques from satellite imagery, while his first postdoctoral research focused on predictive mapping of bluetongue disease vectors in the Mediterranean region based on environmental variables and the distribution and abundance of midges of the genus Culicoides.
Tatem lives in Gainesville with his wife, and in his spare time he “plans to make full use of the Florida outdoor lifestyle to make up for having recently spent many years in the sun-deprived United Kingdom.”
Contact information:
Emerging Pathogens Institute
University of Florida
P.O. Box 100009
Gainesville, Florida 32610-0009
Voice: (352) 273-9373
Email: ATatem@ufl.edu