What do human movement, climate variability and social structures have in common? They are all essential components in understanding the spread of infectious diseases, according to UC Berkeley Demography Professor Ayesha Mahmud.
Mahmud’s research uses data-driven modeling and behavioral analysis to investigate how diseases spread in different environments — urban and rural, humid and dry, connected and isolated.
Her current projects focus on how individual behavior and large-scale population movements interact with environmental change. Mahmud’s research team develops models that integrate demographic, climatic and social data to model and forecast disease transmission patterns and assess the impact of potential interventions.
One of their notable findings is that chickenpox transmission increases in drier conditions, a climate link that had not previously been established. Another is that access to real-time mobile data could help public health teams predict disease hotspots more accurately than ever before.
“My work is ultimately about applying science to reduce health disparities and improve response,” Mahmud said. “Especially as climate change accelerates, we need new ways to anticipate and address the health risks it creates.”
Her work has spanned multiple continents and diseases — from chickenpox and RSV to COVID-19 and cholera. Mahmud’s research combines climate data, mobile phone movement data, census records and digital behavior trends to better predict and respond to public health challenges.
During the early months of the pandemic, she co-led the Berkeley Interpersonal Contact Study (BICS) along with fellow demography faculty member Dennis Feehan, one of the first major U.S.-based efforts to track social behavior and contact patterns that influence infection risk.
“We found significant variations across age, gender and racial groups — who people interacted with and how often really mattered,” she said.
She has also studied the impact of natural disasters on disease outcomes, estimating mortality after Hurricane Maria and building cholera risk forecasts after cyclones in Mozambique.
“Understanding how social and environmental shocks affect vulnerable populations is critical,” she said.
With a background that bridges physics, economics and population research, Mahmud’s academic path has taken her from studying the stars to mapping disease transmission.
“I started out doing astronomy research as an undergrad,” she said. “But I became increasingly drawn to public health and how human systems interact with biology and the environment.”
That interest led her to pursue a Ph.D. in demography at Princeton, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard focused on planetary health.
Mahmud’s research is primarily supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with additional funding from the Gates Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Meta Inc.
