Will Eaton, MPH

Will Eaton is a PhD candidate in the Department of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease. He earned an MPH in Global Epidemiology from the Colorado School of Public Health (CSPH). 

At CSPH, he studied environmental risk factors for peripheral malaria among pregnant women in western Kenya and identified schistosomiasis parasite reservoirs in areas approaching elimination in Sichuan, China. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Will developed and co-authored practical approaches for targeting bed net distribution campaigns to combat malaria in Uganda, Nigeria, and Malawi. Recently, he co-authored a study examining the geospatial clustering of Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus in rural Uganda. 

At Tulane, Will worked with the Center for Applied Malaria Research & Evaluation (CAMRE) on developing an attractive targeted sugar bait (ATSB) cluster randomized controlled trial and has assembled evaluation strategies for a larval source management pilot in Grand’Anse, Haiti. He is developing a proof-of-concept machine learning framework for the automated detection and classification of damage to deployed ATSBs. He is also the recipient of the Health Systems Analytics Research Center Award, supporting the exploration of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) to extract and summarize results from health economic evaluation literature. 

His dissertation focuses on elimination in the last remaining malaria-endemic region of the Caribbean, the island of Hispaniola. He is estimating the impact and cost-effectiveness of a package of interventions (long-lasting insecticidal nets, targeted indoor residual spraying, and targeted mass drug administration) in the highest malaria incidence region of Haiti. He is also exploring the role of secondary vectors in malaria transmission by examining the association between human IgG responses to Anopheles salivary peptides and malaria infection.