Center for
Global Health

Scholar

Languages: English (native), Spanish (fluent)

Bio statement

Michael Z. Levy, PhD Professor of Epidemiology, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Michael Z. Levy studies the interface of insects, pathogens, and people. As a Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, he works across the disciplines of epidemiology, ecology, and statistics to understand and control vector-borne and infectious diseases.

In 2004, Dr. Levy founded the UPenn/Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia Zoonotic Disease Laboratory in Arequipa, Peru, which he continues to co-direct. The laboratory — home to 28 full-time staff and students, including biologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, social scientists, and health communicators — has spent two decades studying the control of urban Chagas disease transmission. Working alongside Peru's Ministry of Health, the team has helped contain a Chagas disease epidemic in a city of one million people and is now working to stem an emerging canine rabies epidemic.

More recently, Dr. Levy has turned his attention to bugs closer to home: bed bugs. That work has drawn him into the overlapping worlds of housing policy, economics, and social justice — and from there into modeling the effects of eviction on the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Levy's research reflects a conviction that the greatest challenges to public health defy traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Recent global health projects

The difficulties faced by a community when trying to control a dangerous insect are in many ways analogous to those faced by the body when attacked by a pathogen. Through evolution mammals have developed a complex and interlocking defense against invaders, an immune system well-honed to detect and control infections. The adaptive immune system relies on communication among autonomous entities to recognize pathogens and recruit effector cells; it includes a combination of systemic and local responses to remove pathogens; and, most amazingly, tightly regulates these responses and creates memory to improve them in the future.

The aim of the proposed collaborative interdisciplinary and international research is to develop a new paradigm for the control of dangerous insects patterned after the adaptive immune system. The project will adapt aspects of the immune system from the scale of cells to that of landscapes, and test the new approach against a conventional one using a randomized cluster design in an ongoing Chagas disease vector control program in the city of Arequipa, Peru.

Selected publications

Singh P, Sheen J, Saad-Roy CM, Levy MZ, Metcalf CJE. Coevolution of host resistance and pathogen exploitation in a propagule-mediated infection model. PLOS Computational Biology. 2026;22(3):e1013999. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013999

Nande A, Levy MZ, Hill AL. Understanding patterns of variant emergence and spread in an ongoing epidemic. medRxiv. 2026:2026.03.27.26349560. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.27.26349560

Castillo-Neyra R, Díaz EW, Bellotti BR, Morucci K, De la Puente-León M, Ortiz-Cam L, Levy MZ. Cave dogs around major urban areas of Arequipa, Peru, threaten rabies elimination program. Frontiers in Veterinary Science. 2025;12:1649737. https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2025.1649737

Michael Levy: Kindling, Logs & Coal: The Dynamics of T. cruzi transmission in Arequipa, Peru. Population Biology of Vector-Borne Diseases Edited by John M. Drake, Michael Bonsall, and Michael Strand. Oxford University Press, February 2021.
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198853244.001.0001/oso-9780198853244-chapter-12

Larson A, Paz-Soldan V, Arevalo C, Brown J, Condori-Pino C, Levy M, Neyra RC. : Misuse, perceived risk, and safety issues of household insecticides: qualitative findings from focus groups in Arequipa, Peru. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 2021.
https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0009251

Rose EB, Roy JA, Castillo-Neyra R, Ross ME, Condori-Pino C, Peterson JK, Naquira-Velarde C, Levy MZ. A real-time search strategy for finding urban disease vector infestations. Epidemiologic Methods. 2020 Jan 1;9(1).
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/em-2020-0001/html

R Curtis-Robles, SA Hamer, S Lane, MZ Levy, GL Hamer (2017). Bionomics and Spatial Distribution of Triatomine Vectors of Trypanosoma cruzi in Texas and Other Southern States, USA. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 6 Nov 2017. doi: 10.4269/ajtmh.17-0526. 

SK Nutman, A Gutfraind, E Billig, R Castillo-Neyra, MZ Levy (2017). A Bandit Model to Optimize Entomological Surveys. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 95 (5), 53-54.

R Castillo-Neyra, E Zegarra, Y Monroy, RF Bernedo, I Cornejo-Rosello, V Paz-Soldan, MZ Levy (2017). Spatial Association of Canine Rabies Outbreak and Ecological Urban Corridors, Arequipa, Peru. Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease 2 (3), 38. doi: 10.3390/tropicalmed2030038.

MT Rieders, P Emedom-Nnamdi, MZ Levy (2017). Queueing Analysis of a Chagas Disease Control Campaign. eprint arXiv:1706.08668. 27 Jun 2017.

CM Barbu, K Sethuraman, EMW Billig, MZ Levy (2017). Two‐scale dispersal estimation for biological invasions via synthetic likelihood. Ecography, 21 Aug 2017.  doi: 10.1111/ecog.02575.

Last Updated: 13 May 2026