Rate My Professor Daniel Becker

Daniel Becker is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, a position he has held since 2021. He earned a PhD in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia in 2017, with a dissertation on linking anthropogenic resources to wildlife-pathogen dynamics in vampire bats, advised by Sonia Altizer and Daniel Streicker. Earlier, he received a BA in Anthropology, Global Health, Science & Society from Bard College in 2010. Becker's postdoctoral training included a position as a researcher in Microbiology & Immunology at Montana State University from 2017 to 2018, followed by an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Biology at Indiana University from 2018 to 2021. His research as principal investigator of the Becker Lab focuses on disease ecology, examining zoonotic pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, and protozoa in reservoir hosts like bats and wild songbirds. He investigates how anthropogenic resource provisioning, urbanization, land use changes, and environmental factors drive pathogen spillover, host immunity, ecoimmunology, animal movement, and transmission risks. Becker employs field studies, meta-analyses, epidemiological models, -omics techniques, and machine learning to develop predictive models for emerging infectious diseases and inform surveillance strategies, including ongoing monitoring of viral infections in bat populations in Belize funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Becker has received prestigious awards recognizing his early-career excellence, including the 2025 Early Career Fellowship from the Ecological Society of America, the 2025 OU President’s Associates Second Century Presidential Professorship, the 2024 OU Neal Lane Award for Excellence in Research in the Natural Sciences, the 2023 Oak Ridge Associated Universities Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, and Scialog Fellowships and Collaborative Innovation Awards in 2021 and 2022. He is a National Geographic Explorer, a commissioner on The Lancet Commission on Prevention of Viral Spillover, and co-PI of the NSF Biology of Innovated Interfaces (BII) Verena Institute. His highly cited publications appear in leading journals and include 'Linking anthropogenic resources to wildlife–pathogen dynamics: a review and meta-analysis' (Ecology Letters, 2015; 437 citations), 'Land use-induced spillover: a call to action to safeguard environmental, animal, and human health' (The Lancet Planetary Health, 2021; 427 citations), 'Wildlife health and supplemental feeding: a review and management recommendations' (Biological Conservation, 2016; 340 citations), 'City sicker? A meta-analysis of wildlife health and urbanization' (Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2019; 248 citations), and 'Optimising predictive models to prioritise viral discovery in zoonotic reservoirs' (The Lancet Microbe, 2022). Becker's contributions advance understanding of global health threats, bridging wildlife ecology, virology, and policy for preventing zoonotic outbreaks.