Climate Effects on the Virus, Diagnosis Criteria, and a New Testing Procedure

About the Speakers

Kyle Meng, PhD, Assistant Professor, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management; and Department of Economics, UCSB

An economist with training in engineering and atmospheric physics, Prof Meng examines environmental and resource economics, with a focus on climate change’s impacts on human behavior, in order to improve policies. He will be addressing whether the change of seasons may affect infection patterns of the novel coronavirus, and how to adjust containment policies.

Lynn N. Fitzgibbons, MD, Infectious Disease Specialist, Cottage Health, Santa Barbara

Dr. Fitzgibbons re-joins our webinar series, this time to describe background to the clinical diagnostic criteria to determine SARS-CoV2 infections. Dr. Fitzgibbons oversees the HIV and Infectious Disease clinic at the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department; she is the chair of the Division of Infectious Disease at Cottage Health, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Geography at UCSB.

Carolina Arias Gonzalez, PhD, Assistant Professor in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, UCSB

Dr. Arias also returns to our series to describe the development a new, low-cost, field-deployable test for the presence of the COVOD-19 virus using CRISPR, in the context of current US testing capacity, and plans to implement the test at UCSB and the Santa Barbara community. Prof Arias is an expert in virus-host interactions, and in the identification of drugs and FDA-approved compounds that can be used to curtail virus infections.