About Me

Hi, my name is Wilmer Amaya-Mejia. I am an avian disease ecologist. My work applies ecological, genetic, and evolutionary concepts to understand the interaction between diseases and birds, from a community to an individual scale.

Outside of my main research focus, I aim to improve diversity, equity, inclusion, and retention within academia. My community-based initiatives focus on supporting students from elementary school, undergraduate programs, and graduate programs.

I obtained my Bachelor's degree from Virginia Commonwealth University with a focus on ecology. Afterward, I worked as a lab technician in the Corey Lab developing many of my wet lab skills and delving into genetics research using zebrafish models.

In 2018, I joined the Sehgal lab where I began studying avian diseases, focusing on malaria. I graduated in 2020 with my Master's degree from San Francisco State University.

In 2020-2025, I completed my doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). My research addressed key disease ecology questions. These included disease distribution dynamics associated with land-use change and urbanization, host-parasite interactions related to epigenetic variation and parasite-associated variation in the gut microbiota of birds within a disease framework.

Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at Health and Environment Learning and Modeling (HELM) at Ohio State University.