Research
FloDisMod’s long-term goal is to enhance society’s knowledge of the impact of the emergence of infectious diseases in vulnerable populations in the world’s coastal regions and provide models and maps that can be used to guide the disease management in these regions, influenced by seasonality, extreme weather, and projected climatic events, with the ultimate goal of prevention and controlling infectious diseases.
Our Research focuses on the following five arms:
- Environmental Fluid mechanics models of storm surge, coastal and riverine flow
- Geospatial Disease Data
- Geospatial Vector Data
- Social Vulnerability Data
- Community Engagement
Publications
2026
Global Location-Invariant Peak Storm Surge Prediction
arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.25978
Storm Surge Modeling, Bias Correction, Graph Neural Networks, Graph Convolution Networks
arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.20688
Operator Learning for Surrogate Modeling of Wave-Induced Forces from Sea Surface Waves
arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.06433
Digital Twins for Coastal Flooding
Computing in Science & Engineering
Incorporation of Collagen into Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, and Burkholderia pseudomallei Biofilms Modifies Their Viscoelasticity and Resistance against Phagocytosis
Langmuir 42, 455–469
2025
arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.21208
Coupled Continuous-Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Solver for Compound Flood Simulations
arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.15948
Storm Surge in Color: RGB-Encoded Physics-Aware Deep Learning for Storm Surge Forecasting
arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.21743
Insecticide-treated net use and elimination of malaria in Sub-Saharan African countries: assessing the Global Technical Strategy using an evolutionary game approach
BMC Infect Dis. 25(1):1707
Tick-Borne Disease Knowledge in the Transboundary USA–Mexico Region
Vector Borne Zoonotic Dis. (Online ahead of print)
Comparing machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning performance in Culex pipiens predictive modeling
PLoS One 20(11):e0333536
Levels of extracellular ATP in growth zones of Arabidopsis primary roots are changed by altered expression of apyrase enzymes
Plant Signal. Behav. 16, 1584871
Modified pea apyrase has altered nuclear functions and enhances the growth of yeast and Arabidopsis
Front. Plant Sci. 16:1584871
2024
Downscaling Neural Network for Coastal Simulations
arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.16553
npj Nat. Hazards 1, 44
Stochastic games of parental vaccination decision making and bounded rationality
Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering, 22(2), 355–388
Vaccination games of boundedly rational parents toward new childhood immunization
Infectious Disease Modeling, 11(1)
Correcting physics-based global tide and storm water level forecasts with the temporal fusion transformer
Ocean Modelling 195, 102509
Climate change is projected to shrink phylogenetic endemism of Neotropical frogs
Nat. Commun. 16(1):3713
A mechanistic statistical approach to infer invasion characteristics of human-dispersed species with complex life cycle
Ecol. Monogr. 95(1):e70003
Opportunities and challenges for monitoring terrestrial biodiversity in the robotics age
Nat. Ecol. Evol. 9(6):1031–1042
Semiautomated generation of species-specific training data from large, unlabeled acoustic datasets for deep supervised birdsong isolation
PeerJ 12:e17854
BioSense: An Automated Sensing Node for Organismal and Environmental Biology
HardwareX 20, e00585
An Intergeneric Hybrid Between Historically Isolated Temperate and Tropical Jays Following Recent Range Expansion
Ecol. Evol. 15(9):e72148
Optimizing third party funding to alleviate global drug resistance: A game-theoretic modelling approach
International Journal of Biomathematics
Functional data learning using convolutional neural networks
Machine Learning: Science and Technology, 5(1)
Modeling the effect of observational social learning on parental decision-making for childhood vaccination and diseases spread over household networks
Front. Epidemiol., Sec. Infectious Disease Epidemiology, 3
Review of the life history and conservation of federally endangered plant species of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas, USA
Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas 18(1), 233–266
2023
A framework for flexible peak storm surge prediction
Coastal Engineering 186, 104406
The accumulation and growth of Pseudomonas aeruginosa on surfaces is modulated by surface mechanics via cyclic-di-GMP signaling
NPJ Biofilms Microbiomes 9, 78
Predicting the Impact of Climate Change on the Distribution of Rhipicephalus sanguineus in the Americas
Sustainability 15, 1–12
Adjusting for Berkson error in exposure in ordinary and conditional logistic regression and in Poisson regression
BMC Med. Res. Methodol. 23(1):225
Efectos Potenciales Del Cambio Climático En La Distribución De Colibríes: Un Estudio De Caso Con Especies De Los Géneros
Ornitología Neotropical 23(5), 4
2022
Modeling the Impact of Climate Change on Cervid Chronic Wasting Disease in Semi-Arid South Texas
Front. Epidemiol. 2:889280
Conserving Crop Wild Relatives along the Texas–Mexico Border: The Case of Manihot
Plants 14(9), 5392
2021
Ecology in the age of automation
Science 373(6557):858–859
Sci. Rep. 11, 3354
Evaluation of the United States COVID-19 Vaccine Allocation Strategy
PLOS One, 16(11), e0259700
Mitigating the externality of diseases of poverty through health aid
Royal Society Open Science, 8(10), 211450
Skin models for cutaneous melioidosis reveal Burkholderia infection dynamics at wound's edge with inflammasome activation, keratinocyte extrusion and epidermal detachment
Emerg. Microbes Infect. 10, 2326–2339
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 22(6):3283
Temperatures Influence Susceptibility to Insecticides in Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus (Diptera: Culicidae) Mosquitoes
Pathogens 10(8), 992
2020
A tale of two cities: Aedes Mosquito surveillance across the Texas–Mexico Border
Subtropical Agriculture and Environments 71, 12
Partial characterization of the voltage-gated sodium channel gene and molecular detection of permethrin resistance in Rhipicephalus annulatus (Say, 1821)
Ticks and Tick-Borne Diseases 11(3), 101368
2017
Temporal variation in the abundance and timing of daily activity of Chagas disease vector Triatoma gerstaeckeri (Stål, 1859) in a Natural Habitat in the Lower Rio Grande Valley
The Journal of Parasitology 103(5), 574–578
2015
Melioidosis Diagnostic Workshop, 2013: Diagnostic Gaps in Endemic and Non-endemic Areas
J. Emerg. Infect. Dis. 21, 141045