
Micaela Martinez, PhD
Assistant Professor
Columbia University
Dr. Martinez is an infectious disease ecologist, currently an Assistant Professor at Columbia University in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences. She earned her Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolution in 2015 at the University of Michigan, followed by two years at Princeton University. Her primary focus is understanding the drivers of seasonality in infectious disease systems and the impact of circadian and seasonal rhythms on disease. Supported by the NIH Early Independence Award, her current research aims to understand how ecology, demography, and physiology intersect to drive the transmission of epidemic-prone diseases, including poliomyelitis, measles, chickenpox, and SARS-CoV-2.
Dr. Martinez’s lab also conducts research on maternal immunity in infants and is building a statistical inference pipeline for studying vaccine modes of action and other interventions. She utilizes cutting-edge statistical inference techniques and mathematical models to couple disease incidence data with clinical immunology to gain insight into the population dynamics of disease.