Presidential Postdoc honored by American Society of Naturalists

Ashwini Ramesh’s ideas about the similarities between infections and ecological co-existence have helped earn her an Early Investigator Award from the American Society of Naturalists.

Ramesh, an Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior MSU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, was one of four scholars selected for the award which recognize outstanding and promising work by investigators within three years after earning their PhD.

As an infectious disease scientist, she grapples with a longstanding, fundamental question in global health: Why are multiple coinfections so common? What mechanisms within the host facilitate it? Equally important, what prevents it? The answer to these questions has been hindered by an underdeveloped mechanistic framework of coinfection.

While taking a graduate class on community ecology and food web theory, Ramesh had a compelling realization: could coinfection be viewed as a form of successful coexistence between pathogen strains mirroring species coexistence in traditional ecological communities? While predator-prey theory and within-host infection have been compared in the past, a quantitative comparison had not yet been realized. Ramesh’s work borrows old but classic ideas of species coexistence and translate them into a parasitic realm via new theory and experiments.

“What struck me was that just because concepts from community ecology are old, they’re not outdated; they offer new insights that could redefine how we approach infectious health," Ramesh said. Ultimately, her work advances how an ecological niche framework of pathogen coinfection can offer solutions to public health interventions.

Ramesh joined MSU after receiving the EEB Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship and is now part of a collaborative team as an Institute for Biodiversity, Ecology, Evolution, and Macrosystems (IBEEM) Postdoctoral Fellow. During her fellowship, Ramesh launched the EEB Art in Science Prize, a workshop on the "hidden curriculum" of the postdoc market and supporting the writing goals of the EEB community via weekly coworking.

The ASN Early Investigator Award includes a cash prize and the honor of presenting a symposium at the American Society of Naturalists' annual meeting during Evolution 2025. Ramesh will continue to advance her research program this fall as a G. Evelyn Hutchinson Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale.

She will continue her work as a G. Evelyn Hutchinson Environmental Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale this fall.