Alex Burnham is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate and National Science Foundation Research Fellow in the department of biology at the University of Vermont. His interests include disease ecology, epidemiological modeling, statistics and pollinator conservation. He graduated from the University of Vermont with a B.S. in zoology where he began combining his interest in pollinators with a passion for statistics and computer science. Advised by Dr. Nicholas Gotelli and Dr. Allison Brody, his work broadly aims to examine how RNA viruses and the microsporidian parasite (Nosema spp.) spread from one species of bee to another and how these two pathogens interact within the host. Alex’s work uses a combination of mathematical modeling and empirical work to better understand how disease spillover and temporal variation in disease load and prevalence influences patterns of co-infection in both native and managed bees. In addition, Alex is a member of the Vermont Complex Systems Center’s data science program and spends his summers as the Vermont Assistant Coordinator for the National Honeybee Survey (USDA-APHIS), a national study designed to gather baseline data on honey bee disease in North America.