Wayne

Research Expertise and Interest

Africa, disease ecology, wildlife conservation, resource management

Research Description

Wayne Getz is a professor in the graduate school of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.  Students and postdoctoral students in his laboratory work on a broad range of theoretical and applied questions in population and biology with application to epidemiology and conservation biology.

Current Projects

At this time projects in his laboratory include:

(i) Appropriate Complexity Modeling of Biological Systems, computational population biology and development of the Nova modeling building platform.

(ii) Disease Ecology with a focus on zoonotic diseases.

(iii) Movement Ecology: exploring the causes, patterns, mechanisms and consequences of organism movements.

In the News

America on edge: Berkeley scholars’ early election thoughts

UC Berkeley scholars awoke Wednesday, Nov. 4 to signs of a deeply divided U.S. electorate, and no blue wave on the horizon. Despite a surge in early voting, ballots were still being counted in several battleground states. As of noon that day, the race between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden remained too close to call. 

Coronavirus outbreak raises question: Why are bat viruses so deadly?

It’s no coincidence that some of the worst viral disease outbreaks in recent years — SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg and likely the newly arrived 2019-nCoV virus — originated in bats. A new University of California, Berkeley, study finds that bats’ fierce immune response to viruses could drive viruses to replicate faster, so that when they jump to mammals with average immune systems, such as humans, the viruses wreak deadly havoc.

Deadly human diseases may have killed off the Neanderthals

For tens of thousands of years, modern humans and Neanderthals lived side-by-side in the region where Africa meets Eurasia. And then, some 40,000 years ago, our evolutionary cousins suddenly went extinct, leaving us as the only human species surviving on the planet. The sudden disappearance of the Neanderthals has remained somewhat of a mystery to scientists, but a new study, led by researchers at Stanford University and co-authored by researchers at UC Berkeley and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, suggests that deadly diseases carried by modern humans may have been what ultimately led to their demise.

Wildlife biologists put dogs' scat-sniffing talents to good use

UC Berkeley biologists have harnessed dogs' natural talent for sniffing out the scat of other animals for a good cause. With the help of Working Dogs for Conservation, a Montana-based nonprofit organization, researchers are fine-tuning the use of dogs as a non-invasive tool for wildlife studies and management.

Ecology and epidemiology in the age of GPS

Berkeley professor Wayne Getz uses global positioning technology, along with his background in mathematics, to help conserve zebra, buffalo and other animals in his native South Africa. In the process, he is helping to train the next generation of African-born ecologists.

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