Giulio De Leo

About

Giulio De Leo is a Professor of Oceans, of Earth System Science, and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. He is a theoretical ecologist by training and vocation, focusing his research on the factors and processes that drive the dynamics of natural and harvested populations, with an emphasis on using this knowledge to inform practical management. Since joining Stanford, his research has concentrated on the resilience of natural and managed ecosystems to natural and anthropogenic stressors, environmental shocks, and climate change. He studies resilience from two contrasting perspectives: on one hand, examining populations that demonstrate resilience despite efforts to control or eradicate them, such as parasitic and infectious diseases; on the other hand, working to understand how to enhance the resilience of marine populations of commercial or conservation interest against harvesting, environmental shocks, and climate change. His work spans theoretical and applied problems, including the conservation of the European eel, sustainable management of the abalone fishery in Baja California, biocontrol of schistosomiasis in Western Africa, and exploring the relationship between resource exploitation, infectious diseases, and poverty traps. De Leo co-founded the Stanford Program for Disease Ecology, Health, and the Environment, and the Stanford Disease Ecology in a Changing World initiative, as well as the Stanford Human and Planetary…

Research topics

• Geography
• Biology
• Ecology
• Economics
• Medicine
• Business
• Computer Science
• Environmental planning
• Environmental resource management
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• Human-mediated impacts on biodiversity and the consequences for zoonotic disease spillover

  Current Biology · 2021 · 109 citations

  DOI

• Improving rural health care reduces illegal logging and conserves carbon in a tropical forest

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 72 citations

  = 0.038). Concurrently, the intervention provided health care access to more than 28,400 unique patients, with clinic usage and patient visitation frequency highest in communities participating in the intervention. Finally, we observed a dose-response in forest change rate to intervention engagement (person-contacts with intervention activities) across communities bordering the park: The greatest logging reductions were adjacent to the most highly engaged villages. Results suggest that this comm…

  DOI

• How to identify win–win interventions that benefit human health and conservation

  Nature Sustainability · 2020 · 63 citations

  DOI

• The influence of vector‐borne disease on human history: socio‐ecological mechanisms

  Ecology Letters · 2021 · 62 citations

  Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) are embedded within complex socio-ecological systems. While research has traditionally focused on the direct effects of VBDs on human morbidity and mortality, it is increasingly clear that their impacts are much more pervasive. VBDs are dynamically linked to feedbacks between environmental conditions, vector ecology, disease burden, and societal responses that drive transmission. As a result, VBDs have had profound influence on human history. Mechanisms include: (1)…

  DOI

• Models with environmental drivers offer a plausible mechanism for the rapid spread of infectious disease outbreaks in marine organisms

  Scientific Reports · 2020 · 51 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The first signs of sea star wasting disease (SSWD) epidemic occurred in just few months in 2013 along the entire North American Pacific coast. Disease dynamics did not manifest as the typical travelling wave of reaction-diffusion epidemiological model, suggesting that other environmental factors might have played some role. To help explore how external factors might trigger disease, we built a coupled oceanographic-epidemiological model and contrasted three hypotheses on the influence of tempera…

  DOI

Recent grants

• A novel integration of fine scale ecological data, high-resolution precision mapping, and regional network modeling to investigate environmental drivers of schistosomiasis dynamics

  NSF · $2.5M · 2020–2026

• Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Risk mapping and targeted snail control to support schistosomiasis elimination in Brazil and Cote d'Ivoire under future environmental change

  NSF · $162k · 2020–2024

• Ocean Acidification: Collaborative Research: Interactive effects of acidification, low dissolved oxygen and temperature on abalone population dynamics within the California Current

  NSF · $470k · 2014–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Susanne H. Sokolow

  343 shared

• Gilles Riveau

  120 shared

• Fiorenza Micheli

  Stanford University

  115 shared

• Isabel J. Jones

  113 shared

• Andrew J. Chamberlin

  Pacific University

  106 shared

• Marino Gatto

  85 shared

• Chelsea L. Wood

  72 shared

• Kevin D. Lafferty

  United States Geological Survey

  60 shared

Labs

• De Leo LabPI

  Not provided

Education

• PhD in Ecology, Dipartimento di Scienze Ambientali

  Università degli Studi di Parma

  1993

• bachelor and master degree in Environmental Engineering

  Politecnico di Milano

  1989

• Diploma di Maturità Classica

  Liceo Classico Paolo Sarpi

  1983

Awards & honors

• Stanford Program for Disease Ecology Health and the Environm…

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