Vanessa Ezenwa facts for kids

Vanessa Olivia Ezenwa is an American scientist who studies ecology. She is a professor at Yale University, where she teaches about how living things interact with their environment. Her work focuses on how diseases spread among animal groups. In 2020, she was recognized as one of the most inspiring Black scientists in the United States.

Early Life and Learning

When Vanessa Ezenwa was in high school, she became very interested in how diseases affect animals and their environments. She went to Rice University for her first college degree.

Later, she studied at Princeton University. There, she focused on how animals behave in their natural homes. For her main research, she studied eleven different kinds of African hoofed animals, like antelopes and zebras, in Kenya. Some of these animals lived in pairs, while others lived in large groups of up to one hundred. After finishing her studies, Dr. Ezenwa became a researcher at the United States Geological Survey.

Her Work and Discoveries

In 2005, Dr. Ezenwa started teaching at the University of Montana. She later moved to the University of Georgia in 2010. Her main research looks at how infectious diseases affect animal populations. She tries to find the best ways to stop these diseases from spreading.

Studying Diseases in African Buffalo

Dr. Ezenwa has studied how worm infections in African buffalo can make them more likely to get bovine tuberculosis. This is a serious disease. She focused on buffalo living freely in Kruger National Park in South Africa. This park is home to many buffalo that carry the tuberculosis disease. The disease can also spread to other wild animals.

Dr. Ezenwa found that treating the worms in buffalo could make their tuberculosis less severe. This also helped the infected buffalo live longer. However, because the treated buffalo lived longer, they could sometimes spread the disease more.

New Ways to Manage Diseases

Dr. Ezenwa also looks for ways to control diseases without using medicine. For example, she has studied programs where animals are tested for a disease and then separated if they are sick.

Besides African buffalo, Dr. Ezenwa has studied other animals like Grant's gazelle and spiny mice. She has also looked at how climate change and different weather patterns can affect diseases in farm animals.

Dr. Ezenwa helps guide the science magazine Science. In 2020, she was named one of the most inspiring Black scientists in the United States.

Selected Publications