kristian Forbes, PHD
PRINCIPLE INVESTIGATOR

Kristian is a disease ecologist and eco-immunologist. After completing Bachelor and Master degrees in his native Australia, Kristian moved to Finland for his PhD studies, where he stayed on as a postdoc while also spending time in Kenya, South Africa and the US. He has diverse interests in population and disease ecology, with a particular focus on the maintenance and transmission of zoonotic pathogens in wildlife and the effects of anthropogenic environmental changes on these processes.

Contact 
Office Phone: (479) 575-3797
EmaiL: kmforbes@uark.edu

Postdocs

Tamika Lunn, PhD

Tamika is a wildlife disease ecologist with an interest in the dynamics and drivers of infectious diseases, particularly in bats. She enjoys multi-disciplinary and collaborative research to tackle big questions in this field. As a postdoctoral researcher in the Forbes Lab she is studying bat-ebolavirus ecology in East Africa. Give her coffee and she will do Science. ​

Brent Newman, PhD

Brent is interested in wildlife and zoonotic disease ecology, invasion epidemiology as it relates to non-native terrestrial vertebrates, and ticks and tick-borne diseases. His research in the Forbes lab focuses on habitat and parasite coinfection as drivers of heterogeneity in cross-scale wildlife infectious diseases processes via the bank vole-Puumala hantavirus system in northern Europe.

graduate Students

Reilly JacksoN

PHD STUDENT
rtj006@uark.edu 

Reilly's research interests include disease ecology and management, human-wildland interface in underdeveloped and developing countries, conservation biology, and tropical ecology. In the Forbes Lab, she is studying urban roost selection of bats that potentially pose disease risks, as well as niche modeling and movement ecology of disease reservoir species in Kenya.

Nathaniel Mull

PHD STUDENT
ngmull@uark.edu 

Nathaniel (Than) is broadly interested in population and community ecology of rodents. His PhD thesis is focused on disease dynamics of rodents, primarily in prairie habitats within Arkansas, with the goal of understanding the impacts of habitat degradation and restoration on rodent communities and their diseases.

Shannon Kitchen

PHD STUDENT 
smkitche@uark.edu

Shannon is interested in exploring the impacts of environmental change on host-parasite interactions, population disease dynamics, and the emergence of zoonotic pathogens. Her project in the Forbes lab  consists of a large-scale, longitudinal field study examining the influence of resource availability and helminth co-infection on Puumala hantavirus transmission in bank voles.

JOSEPH OGOLA, DVM

PHD STUDENT

Joseph is a veterinarian and PhD student enrolled at the University of Nairobi. He is co-supervised by Kristian. Joseph works as a county vet in western Kenya, but his interest in emerging infectious diseases led him to pursue a PhD. For his research, Joseph is investigating viruses in bats and rodents from three sites in Kenya - the Taita Hills, Kibera urban settlement in Nairobi, and Busia county in western Kenya. 

Undergraduate Students

Sydney Darling

Alexia Hernandez

Houston Lamb

Aaron Norris

Hannah Sullivan