Pamela P. Martinez

About

Pamela P. Martinez is an Assistant Professor with appointments in Microbiology, Statistics, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Her scientific interest lies at the intersection of biological and epidemiological mechanisms that govern the population dynamics of infectious diseases. Her research group employs mathematical and statistical approaches to investigate how pathogen diversity, host heterogeneity, and environmental factors influence the transmission and control of human pathogens. A central focus of her work is understanding the emergence and maintenance of pathogen diversity and its impacts on disease control, with particular attention to how reassortment and immune responses affect rotavirus dynamics in endemic settings and interfere with public health interventions. Additionally, she studies the effects of sociodemographic factors such as age, race/ethnicity, income, and past exposures on viral disease transmission to better understand how population heterogeneity shapes disease dynamics. Her research also aims to characterize within-host dynamics of viral infections, including individual-level heterogeneity in infectiousness across different respiratory infections, to investigate viral shedding and clearance dynamics. Furthermore, she quantifies the impact of temperature and specific humidity on the seasonality and long-term dynamics of acute infections by fitting long time series of disease incidence to mechanistic transmission models,…

Research topics

• Medicine
• Biology
• Internal medicine
• Virology
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Immunology
• Geography
• Demography
• Environmental health

Selected publications

• Socioeconomic status determines COVID-19 incidence and related mortality in Santiago, Chile

  Science · 2021 · 460 citations

  The COVID-19 pandemic has affected cities particularly hard. Here, we provide an in-depth characterization of disease incidence and mortality and their dependence on demographic and socioeconomic strata in Santiago, a highly segregated city and the capital of Chile. Our analyses show a strong association between socioeconomic status and both COVID-19 outcomes and public health capacity. People living in municipalities with low socioeconomic status did not reduce their mobility during lockdowns a…

  DOI

• Daily longitudinal sampling of SARS-CoV-2 infection reveals substantial heterogeneity in infectiousness

  Nature Microbiology · 2022 · 219 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Longitudinal Assessment of Diagnostic Test Performance Over the Course of Acute SARS-CoV-2 Infection

  The Journal of Infectious Diseases · 2021 · 162 citations

  BACKGROUND: Serial screening is critical for restricting spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by facilitating timely identification of infected individuals to interrupt transmission. Variation in sensitivity of different diagnostic tests at different stages of infection has not been well documented. METHODS: In a longitudinal study of 43 adults newly infected with SARS-CoV-2, all provided daily saliva and nasal swabs for quantitative reverse transcription polyme…

  DOI

• Longitudinal Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections Reveals Limited Infectious Virus Shedding and Restricted Tissue Distribution

  Open Forum Infectious Diseases · 2022 · 65 citations

  Background: The global effort to vaccinate people against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) during an ongoing pandemic has raised questions about how vaccine breakthrough infections compare with infections in immunologically naive individuals and the potential for vaccinated individuals to transmit the virus. Methods: We examined viral dynamics and infectious virus shedding through daily longitudinal sampling in 23 adults infected with SARS-CoV-2 at varying stages of v…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The neglected role of relative humidity in the interannual variability of urban malaria in Indian cities

  Nature Communications · 2022-01-27 · 61 citations

  articleOpen access

  The rapid pace of urbanization makes it imperative that we better understand the influence of climate forcing on urban malaria transmission. Despite extensive study of temperature effects in vector-borne infections in general, consideration of relative humidity remains limited. With process-based dynamical models informed by almost two decades of monthly surveillance data, we address the role of relative humidity in the interannual variability of epidemic malaria in two semi-arid cities of India…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ayesha S. Mahmud

  University of California, Berkeley

  31 shared

• Jukka Corander

  University of Oslo

  24 shared

• Taj Azarian

  University of Central Florida

  19 shared

• Pablo A. Marquet

  Santa Fe Institute

  17 shared

• John Broach

  University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School

  15 shared

• Mauricio Santillana

  Northeastern University

  13 shared

• Matthew L. Robinson

  13 shared

• Caroline O. Buckee

  Harvard University

  13 shared

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