Newly appointed assistant professor of population health and disease prevention, Tetyana Vasylyeva, DPhil, MPH, MS, at the UC Irvine Program in Public Health, knows all too well about the public health crises caused by war and displacement. Even before her country fell into war and chaos, and her family was displaced from their community, the Ukrainian-born public health researcher knew she wanted to build a research portfolio to apply socio-molecular epidemiology to investigate viral infections transmission in forcibly displaced populations.
Like many of my new colleagues, the growth and upward trajectory of UCI Public Health is exciting. Starting with a new school has a lot of benefits where growth and collaboration are at a high.”
– Dr. Tetyana Vasylyeva
Molecular epidemiology is the analysis of a virus’ genetic data: understanding how viruses evolve can tell us how they move between different individuals and populations. One of Tetyana’s papers which she was the first author of led to the first implementation of molecular epidemiology to assess the effect of a major scale socio-political event, such as war, on HIV transmission. The idea, referred to as the “Big Event” framework, first formulated by Sam Friedman, is that large-scale social, political, and military events can lead to rapid change in health-related norms, beliefs, social networks, and behavioral practices.
“My current work is in studying the effect of the war, and the disruption it caused to health care services and to people’s lives, on the HIV epidemic in Ukraine,” Tetyana said. “It was the work that I started in Ukraine 12 years ago that led me to focus my further attention and training on understanding how war and mass displacement affect the spread of infectious diseases.”
Throughout her training, Tetyana has bounced back and forth between her war-torn country, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Following a 2-year master’s degree program in epidemiology at SUNY in Albany, NY, she became a project director of a large-scale HIV prevention program in Ukraine, which has one of the worst HIV rates in all of Europe. This is when Eastern Ukraine was first attacked by Russia.
After this project, Tetyana was accepted into a doctoral program at the University of Oxford where she would go on to earn a DPhil (PhD) in molecular epidemiology. While at Oxford, she received two fellowships, a highly competitive Junior Research Fellowship at New College (University of Oxford) and an internationally celebrated Branco Weiss Fellowship (ETH Zurich). The fellowships have provided tremendous support in her pursuit of a better understanding of how portable genetic sequencing technology and molecular epidemiology can be applied to catastrophic events to estimate times and locations of chronic viral infection transmission in populations of forced migrants.
“The novelty that I added to the Big Events framework is to apply the principles of molecular epidemiology, in additional to more traditional epidemiological surveillance, directly after a major event such as war, famine, or flooding. We should be able to determine how soon after people are displaced from their community and support system, they are at risk for contracting a disease. This will then tell us when to apply interventions,” explained Tetyana.
Paving her way at the UC system
After earning her doctoral degree, Tetyana started as an assistant professor at UC San Diego’s Department of Medicine. She had always had UC Irvine on her radar and had guest lectured with the Program in Public Health in 2019. When a new faculty position opened with the Program’s Department of Population Health & Disease Prevention, Tetyana immediately applied and was hired. She began her tenure track position on October 1st, 2023.
“Like many of my new colleagues, the growth and upward trajectory of UCI Public Health is exciting,” Tetyana said. “Starting with a new school has a lot of benefits where growth and collaboration are at a high.”
While she continues to expand her work beyond Ukraine, Tetyana is also looking forward to building out a lab, mentoring doctoral students, and teaching. She is now in the early stages of starting several pilot projects: A project in Colombia looking at the progression along the HIV continuum of care for Venezuelan refugees and another project in Madagascar studying how new economic development changes migration patterns and HIV risks of female sex workers.
“Sadly, with the growing number of military crises and ecological disasters, there are plenty of opportunities to apply the ‘Big Events’ framework to assess public health crises when populations are facing displacement and risk of disease,” Tetyana said. “I hope that by understanding how virus transmission happens in these settings, we will be better prepared to prevent the spread of disease in new emerging crises.”
