Overview
Tyler Barrett is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Amazon Research Consortium for Climate Change and One Health at the Duke Global Health Institute. His research focuses on rural livelihoods, human mobility, and infectious disease transmission in the context of global environmental change. Barrett approaches these topics through a mix of computational, lab, and field-based methods and his work is currently based in Madagascar and in countries throughout Latin America. He completed his doctoral training in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and holds an MA in Anthropology from Northwestern University.
Current Duke Appointments & Affiliations
Postdoctoral Associate
Evolutionary Anthropology,
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Postdoctoral Associate
Duke Global Health Institute,
University Institutes and Centers
Recent Scholarly Works
Sociodemographic characteristics predict land use patterns by farmers near a protected area in Madagascar.
Journal article Scientific reports · February 2026 Globally, most farms are smaller than 10 hectares. Land use by these smallholder farmers in agricultural frontiers is crucial to conservation, food security, and exposure to infectious diseases. However, solely survey-based land use studies miss the fine s ... Full text CiteSpreading potential in disease relevant networks: Predicting centralities in rural Northeast Madagascar.
Journal article PLOS global public health · January 2026 Heterogeneity in contact patterns can have marked effects on disease transmission, including through superspreading where few individuals drive most infections. Networks based on different types of human-human contacts quantify individuals' centrality, whi ... Full text CiteIdentifying Social-Epidemiological Roles Associated with Viral Exposure Using Regular Equivalence Blockmodeling.
Preprint · December 2, 2025 Identifying individuals at high risk of infection is critical to guiding interventions during infectious disease outbreaks. Network centrality can characterize infection risk, but its utility varies across pathogens and social systems. We used equivalence- ... Full text Link to item CiteRecent Grants
US-Israel Collab: Market Integration, Land Use, and Pathogen Transmission in Rural Madagascar
ResearchGraduate Student · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2023 - 2028Doctoral Dissertation Research: Human mobility and infectious disease transmission in the context of market integration
Inst. Training Prgm or CMEPI-Fellow · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2024 - 2026BSF Travel Grant - Market Integration, Land Use, and Pathogen Transmission in Rural Madagascar
TravelPI-Fellow · Awarded by US-Israel Binational Science Foundation · 2025 - 2025View All Grants