Karla Rascon-Garcia, PhD

Karla holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Davis – her interest in animal health sparked from early exposures to her grandmother’s farm in rural Mexico, which has since matured to a strong interest in One Health. She has over 15 years of global health experience with early partnerships with the Pan-American Health Organization working on the Foot and Mouth Disease Virus, to a recent postdoc as a Fogarty GloCal Fellow working with animal African Trypanosomiasis in Uganda, and her most recent postdoc working with malaria in a longitudinal cohort from western Kenya through Duke University. 

Her research interests hover strongly over neglected tropical diseases, (especially those with zoonotic potential), One Health, social network analysis, vector borne parasitology, transboundary diseases, and spatial disease modeling in global health. Though quantitative in training, she values being empathetically grounded in order to impact the “lives behind the numbers.”