Nearing graduation, Ellis had been searching “all the normal places” for post-doctoral fellowship opportunities when he stumbled across the APHL/CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) Laboratory Fellowship Program on the Internet. Six months later, he found himself more than 4,000 miles from post-Katrina New Orleans, an EID fellow working at the Hawaii state public health laboratory and the University of Hawaii's Asia-Pacific Center for Infectious Disease Ecology.
One of Ellis’s mentors, Bruce Wilcox, is a proponent of eco-health, ecosystem approaches to public health problems. This thinking aligns with Ellis’s own and has driven much of his fellowship work. For example, he has co-authored four scientific papers on topics ranging from the social ecology of avian influenza to the role of ecotones (interfaces between ecological communities) in infectious disease emergence.
During three trips to Thailand to study dengue, a mosquito-borne flavivirus, Ellis said he and colleagues tried “to get at the problem by getting at the underlying problem”: how people store their water. “There are two ways to control dengue,” said Ellis. “City (mosquito) spraying and cleaning, the top down approach, isn’t working. We’re trying to develop community programs that are bottom-up and hopefully more sustainable.”
Ellis assisted Indonesian, Thai and Myanmar health officials with study designs to evaluate health promotion programs intended to spur communities to reduce standing pools of water, prime mosquito breeding habitat. He also helped draft a training manual for a World Health Organization workshop in Bangkok on multidisciplinary, “integrative” public health research.
But Ellis has also been busy in the laboratory. In fact, he hopes one of his lasting contributions will be a newly validated, real-time PCR assay for leptospirosis, a bacterial disease typically caused by exposure to water contaminated with the urine of infected animals. Leptospirosis is prevalent in tropical areas, including Hawaii, and a small outbreak occurred on Oahu about a year before Ellis began his fellowship. He said the assay is “real, real close” to being finished. “It’s up and running. We need to get clinical samples and do some final tests.”
All in all, said Ellis, the EID Fellowship Program “was a fantastic opportunity. I got to work with one of my mentors at the top of his field. I got a number of papers written. And the fellowship let me take a year or two to decide if I’m going to go into academia or do more applied work.”
Thanks to the training he gained as an EID fellow, Ellis’s next public health adventure may be setting up an arbovirology laboratory in Recife as part of a fellowship at Brazil’s Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (a.k.a. Fiocruz), the most prominent scientific health institution in Latin America.