Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Health and strong communities are essential components of well-being. Populations are healthier when we understand how infectious diseases change over time. Communities are stronger when we understand how cooperation overcomes selfishness. My research will lead to healthier populations by explaining how infectious diseases evolve and how immune systems respond to this evolution. My research will lead to stronger communities by outlining how cooperation, under the threat of selfishness, is maintained in uncertain conditions. My long-term vision is to characterize the evolutionary forces that shape well-being to improve public policy in various domains. In pursuit of this vision, my team and I will focus on three short-term objectives. Two objectives relate to evolutionary epidemiology and one relates to cooperation. First, we will examine how parent-to-offspring transmission of an infectious disease agent changes the evolutionary fate of both the agent and its host. We will also predict how changing evolutionary fates impact disease outcomes to generate new strategies for improving public health. The work's novelty comes from exploring three neglected -- but critically important -- ecological regimes. We will tackle cases in which (1a) host populations are not ecologically limited by the disease, (1b) parent-to-offspring transmission is linked to offspring dispersal, and (1c) competition among pathogens occurs within groups colonizing the same host and among groups colonizing different hosts. Second, we will investigate how sex-specific and gender-specific differences in hosts modulate their immune response. We will build on our recent work to better understand how biological and social factors shape the risk of immune disorders. We will target (2a) the effect of life-history differences linked to sex, especially the asymmetries associated with maternity and intrasexual competition for mates, and (2b) the consequences of gender-related variability in social networks. Improved understanding here will fill conspicuous gaps in evolutionary medicine and lay the groundwork for new treatments. Third, we will outline how variable ecological conditions challenge the evolution of cooperation and how cooperation, once established, creates new opportunities for groups. Here, we will take motivation from cooperatively breeding vertebrates to break new ground in our understanding of social behaviour generally. Specifically, we will build theoretical models to predict cooperation's response to uncertainty when the latter moves on a sliding scale. In some cases, the sliding scale captures deterministic change and takes us from equilibrium to chaotic scenarios. In other cases, the sliding scale reflects stochastic change and takes us from low-variance to high-variance scenarios. More broadly, this work will impact plans to preserve cooperative systems -- in both nature and human society -- in the face of growing environmental uncertainty and social unrest.