Position Title
Graduate Student Researcher
Jalika attended Emory University for undergraduate studies and completed her veterinary medicine degree at North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine in 2019. While in veterinary school, she conducted One Health research as a Morris Animal Foundation Scholar, investigating the possibility of shared pathogenicity of Salmonella among mountain gorillas and livestock in the Bwindi region of Uganda. Joining the EpiCenter for Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence (EEIDI) field team in 2021 as a GloCal Health Fellow sponsored by the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center, she returned to Bwindi to characterize mosquito feeding behavior and assess the risk of zoonotic arbovirus transmission. Now Jalika is pursuing her PhD in Epidemiology at UC Davis. Through combining her career pursuits and interests in epidemiology, wildlife and human health, and wildlife conservation, she hopes to improve the wellbeing of human and wild animal populations through the mitigation of vector-borne zoonotic diseases.