Leadership

Michael Lauzardo, MD, MSc, is an associate professor within the division of infectious diseases and global medicine. Also serving as the director of the CDC funded Southeastern National Tuberculosis Center (SNTC) at the University of Florida, he has been involved in public health, teaching and patient care within the College of Medicine since 1997. Trained as an internist and pulmonologist, throughout his career he has been involved in the clinical care of patients with tuberculosis. He has also played a key role with the Florida Department of Health, serving as the Deputy TB Controller for the Florida TB Program and is currently the director of the Florida TB Physicians Network. Previously, he was the chief of the division of infectious diseases and global medicine. His clinical practice and research centers around tuberculosis among at-risk populations and he is involved in various international health activities.

Shantrel Canidate, Ph.D., MPH, a social and behavioral epidemiologist and health equity researcher, joins the institute’s leadership team as the EPI Associate Director for Outreach and Community Partnerships. This role is dedicated to nurturing the internal relationships between multiple UF units, identifying opportunities for external partnerships and fostering research collaboration with Southeastern universities.

Canidate is an assistant professor in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions Department of Epidemiology. In addition, she serves as a faculty member within the social and behavioral science program and the Southern HIV and Alcohol Research Consortium. Her research focuses on applying interdisciplinary approaches to identifying, understanding and addressing substance use and HIV-related health disparities among marginalized populations, such as men who have sex with men (MSM). Her work also aims to leverage electronic health records data through artificial intelligence and utilize causal inference approaches to identify biomedical and behavioral interventions that can reduce racial disparities in HIV care among marginalized populations.

As a double gator, Canidate received both her master’s in public health and a doctorate in public health from UF, specializing in social and behavioral sciences. She later completed a two-year T32 postdoctoral fellowship in the department of epidemiology with the UF Substance Abuse Training Center in Public Health. She is currently funded as a principal investigator through the first-ever Health Equity Scholars for Action grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and through a five-year K01 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Furthermore, she is also funded as a co-investigator by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse.

Dr. Maureen Long is a 1986 graduate of the Iowa State College of Veterinary Medicine’s D.V.M. program. Upon graduation, Dr. Long was a private equine practitioner. In 1993, Dr. Long completed a combined residency/MS program in Large Animal Internal Medicine at the University of Illinois in which she identified Neorickettsia risticii is an abortifacient in horses. Dr. Long completed a combined residency/Phd program at Washington State University in 1998; the focus of her work was Neospora caninum. Dr. Long started as a clinician at UF 1999 in Large Animal Clinical Sciences. Dr. Long has taught in over 30 professional and graduate courses and is highly published in peer reviewed journals and is Co-Editor of the book, Equine Infectious Diseases. At UF, the focus of her research and clinical specialty has been emerging infectious diseases. Her work has included equine encephalitides, particularly West Nile virus. She has studied the comparative efficacy of equine WNV vaccines and investigated the pathological responses of Equine Protozoal Myeloencephalitis as the Fern Audette Endowed Chair in Equine Studies. In recent years she has been a faculty member of Comparative Diagnostic and Population Medicine and a member of the Emerging Pathogens Institute. Her work has evolved to a One Health focus investigating human arboviruses such as Dengue, Zika, and Chikungunya viruses as well as SARS-CoV-2 vaccine responses in humans and SARS-CoV-2 infections in animals. Currently she is the Associate Director of Shared Research Resources at the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute.

I am full professor of Experimental Pathology at the Department of Pathology, Inmunology and Laboratory Medicine of UF College of Medicine, and Holloway Chair for research in Chronic and Infectious Diseases. As a Marie-Curie Fellow, at the Rega Institute (Leuven, Belgium), and post-doctoral scientist with Walter M. Fitch, at the University of California, Irvine (USA), I have been trained in the field of molecular evolution of viruses and phylogenetic analysis. During the last fifteen years, as UF faculty, my research interests have included molecular epidemiology, intra-host viral evolution, and the application of phylogenetic and population genetic methods to the study of human and simian pathogenic viruses (in particular HIV/SIV, HCV, HTLV and influenza). More recently, I have been applying the Bayesian coalescent framework to study molecular evolution and phylogeography of emergent and re-emergent bacterial pathogens, such as MRSA, Shigella, and Vibrio cholerae, using genome-wide SNPs. In addition, my laboratory has developed ad hoc protocols for the generation of high-throughput sequence data (including DNA sequencing, transcriptomics, and miRNA expression profiles) and droplet digital PCR quantitative analyses of viral and bacterial pathogens, as well as several automated bioinformatic and machine learning pipelines for the analysis of large sequence data sets (big data). Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, my group has been tracking the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants in Florida, and we are currently running a coronavirus genomic surveillance program sequencing hundreds of samples per week from infected patients in Florida and the Caribbean area.

Dr. Daniel Swale is an Associate Professor in the Emerging Pathogens Institute and Department of Entomology and Nematology at the University of Florida. Dr. Swale received his B.S. in Biology and Chemistry from Christopher Newport University (2008), his M.S. in Life Sciences from Virginia Tech (2009), and his Ph.D. in insect neurotoxicology from the University of Florida (2012). He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Anesthesiology at Vanderbilt Medical School focusing on the development of pharmacology for potassium ion channels involved in various human diseases. At EPI, his current research lies at the interface of physiology, toxicology, and molecular genetics to provide knowledge on the modes of action, discovery and development, and resistance of various drug and insecticide chemistries. Our lab studies the fundamental and applied aspects of physiology and toxicology by integrating toxicological, pharmacological, electrophysiological, and genomic approaches to address broad ranging hypotheses in model insects, arthropod vectors of human diseases, and agriculture pests. Specifically, the Swale Lab studies the physiotoxicology of ion channels and ion transporters that are understudied as a means to bridge the fundamental knowledge gap that limits our understanding of insect systems. In addition to fundamental physiotoxicology, a branch of the Swale Research Lab focuses on pathogen-vector interactions that alter physiological pathways to enhance pathogenesis of pathogens, alter arthropod behavior, or alter vector competency.

In his spare time, he enjoys fishing, hunting, and triathlons.