Adalgisa Caccone

Dr. Caccone is a senior research scientist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, with secondary appointments in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She is also the director of a research and training center from the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS), the Center for Genetic Analyses of Biodiversity, where students train to use population genetic and genomic tools for organismal levels analyses. Dr. Caccone is also the director a fee-for-service facility for DNA Sanger sequencing and fragment analyses. Her research interests are in the broad area of evolutionary genetics and genomics, using DNA analyses to shed light on a variety of related topics, including phylogeography, landscape genetics, invasion biology, and conservation genetics. For the past 20+ years she has been using population genetic approaches to help elucidate the evolutionary and ecological forces that have and are shaping vectors and parasite distributions. The underlying goal is to help control and monitor vector transmitted diseases by understanding the vector and parasites evolutionary history and demographics and their co-evolution. She worked on the main malaria vector in Africa, the mosquitoes from the Anopheles gambiae complex. In recent years her focus has shifted to other vectors (Glossina tsetse flies and Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus) and on parasites that cause sleeping sickness (Trypanosoma) and Lyme disease and babesiosis (Borellia and Babesia). She is studying the dynamics and evolutionary process shaping range expansions in Aedes albopictus at a global and local scale using genomic approaches to look at the role of neutral and adaptive polymorphisms. She is also working on population genetics and genomic of ticks (Ixodes scapularis) and Norwegian rats (Rattus norvegicus), using DNA analyses to understand invasion patterns at a micro- and macro-geographic scale, including an urban one. A new project in our laboratory is on the evolutionary genomics of hookworms and the genetic underpinnings of benzimidazole resistance.