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Brooklin Hunt

Brooklin Hunt

Concentration: Population Medicine and Epidemiology
Faculty Mentor: TBD 

Brief Biography
Brooklin grew up in a small agricultural town on the Flathead Indian Reservation in rural western Montana. Her upbringing instilled in her an appreciation for the role wildlife and livestock play in cultural practices, local economies, and food security. She heard countless stories of infectious diseases that threatened the health of the wildlife, livestock, and people in her community. During her undergraduate studies, she began studying diseases at the wildlife-human interface as a junior member of Bat OneHealth, a consortium of over 70 researchers worldwide who are developing the scientific basis of zoonotic pandemic prevention. In 2022, Brooklin was awarded a Barry Goldwater Scholarship for her work on land use-induced zoonotic spillover, fruit bat hematology, and COVID-19 testing using working dogs. She further developed her laboratory and clinical research skills during a Mitacs Globalink-Fulbright Canada Summer Research Fellowship where she used Illumina Next Generation Sequencing to characterize reproductive tract microbiomes of cattle with ureaplasmosis and sheep with brucellosis.  These experiences solidified Brooklin’s desire to pursue a career in veterinary sciences in which she could both treat disease outbreaks as a clinician and gather new knowledge from the same outbreaks as a research scientist. 

Since joining the DVM/PhD Combined Degree Pathway at Cornell in 2023, Brooklin’s PhD rotation projects have focused on swine influenza virus vaccine development, epidemiological modeling of coronaviruses in wild bat populations, and clinical pathology of liver disease in domestic donkeys and horses. Brooklin hopes to combine virology, epidemiology, and immunology in her thesis work and subsequently seek board certification in microbiology, epidemiology, or pathology. She plans to become a clinical scientist at an academic, NGO, or government institution where she can study pathogen transmission at wildlife-livestock interfaces and subsequently develop ergonomic and ecologically informed countermeasures to disease emergence. 

Research Interests
Although Brooklin is fascinated by every infectious disease she has ever heard of, she is the most passionate about zoonotic viruses. Brooklin believes that to truly understand a disease system, you must understand it from molecular to metapopulation levels. Thus, she enjoys studying virology, host-pathogen interactions and immunology, epidemiology, population health and herd medicine, pathology, reservoir and interface ecology, and every combination of these related fields. 
 

Degrees
Bachelor of Science in Microbiology (summa cum laude, second major in biotechnology), Montana State University, 2022
 

Publications

  • Hunt, B.E., Falvo, C.A., Crowley, D., Ruiz-Aravena, M. Graves, A.F., Jones, D.N., Lunn, T.J., Dale, A., Peel, A.J., Rynda-Apple, A., Plowright, R.K. (2021). Intrinsic and ecological variables are correlated with neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio in free-living black flying foxes (Pteropus alecto) of eastern Australia. Manuscript in preparation.
  • *Hansen, D., *Hunt, B.E., *Falvo, C.A., Ruiz-Aravena, M., Kessler, M.K., Hall, J., Thompson, P., Rose, K., Jones, D.N., Lunn, T.L., Dale, A., Peel, A.J., Plowright, R.K. (2022). Morphological and quantitative analysis of leukocytes in free-living Australian black flying foxes (Pteropus alecto). PLoS ONE. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268549. *Co-first authors
  • Sanchez, C., Penrose, M., Kessler, M.K., Becker, D.J., McKeown, A., Hannappel, M., Boyd, V., Camus, M.S., Padgett-Stewart, T., Peel, Hunt, B.E., Graves, A.F., Peel, A.J., Westcott, D.A., Rainwater, T.R., Chumchal, M.M., Cobb, G.P., Altizer, S., Plowright, R.K., Boardman, R.K. (2022). Land use, season, and parasitism predict metal concentrations in Australian flying fox fur. Science of the Total Environment. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.156699.
  • Reaser, J.K., Hunt, B.E., Ruiz-Aravena, M., Tabor, G.M., Becker, D., Locke, H., Hudson, P., Plowright, R.K. (2022). Reducing land use-induced spillover risk by fostering landscape immunity: policy priorities for conservation practitioners. Conservation Letters. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12869.