Happy hour with a scientist

Join SWARM in conversation with two veterinary researchers who study zoonotic diseases. Christie Mayo and Angela Bosco-Lauth will talk about surprising COVID discoveries — such as how the virus has infected wild deer, captive tigers, and other animal species. We hear about COVID spillover all the time, but what does it really mean when a virus infects multiple species?

Mayo is a veterinarian and diagnostic virologist specializing in bluetongue virus, which affects livestock. (Just ask her about biting midges!) She works with novel diagnostics and next-generation sequencing to monitor emerging infectious diseases in various animal species.

Bosco-Lauth is a veterinarian whose laboratory focuses on understanding how pathogens affect their host. Much of her current research focuses on how SARS-CoV-2 infects different species of animals and how readily the virus can be transmitted between hosts.

Christie and Angela both work at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Some background reading: in February, they and a colleague published a piece in The Conversation that describes how deer, mink, hyenas and other creatures can catch COVID. And here's an unrelated piece from Nature last month that describes COVID infection in white-tailed deer in North America.

Come with a beverage of your choice and your best COVID spillover questions. 

Photo by Alex Witze. No COVID was transmitted during this species-species interaction.