Cara N. Love, PhD
Cara’s goal is to help further our understanding of resilience to anthropogenic stressors and how what we learn from wildlife can help inform human health
The world is undergoing rapid transformation, and in the Anthropocene, human activity has left few environments untouched. While we are only beginning to grasp how ecosystems and wildlife are responding to these widespread changes, it is clear that the consequences extend beyond the natural world—often posing serious risks to human health and disease resilience. Cara’s work explores how wildlife adapt to and withstand anthropogenic pressures, asks whether these insights can help inform innovative approaches to persistent challenges in human health.
Connecting Systems and Ideas
Cara’s research is deeply interdisciplinary, integrating immunology, genomics, ecology, evolutionary biology, ecotoxicology, and disease and cancer biology to investigate how chronic exposure to anthropogenic stressors shape health and population dynamics.
Informing conservation, scientific theory, and mechanisms important to individual and population health
Cara combines fieldwork and laboratory approaches with genomic, transcriptomic, and evolutionary tools to investigate physiological responses and resilience to chronic environmental stress. Her work advances our understanding of how to sustain a healthy and robust natural world, while also offering insights into adaptive resilience that have the potential to inform human medicine.
A good question can take
you anywhere
Cara’s research encompasses numerous systems and species worldwide.