Will Rogers

Hi, I'm Will! I'm a behavioral ecologist fascinated by the feedback between animal behavior and parasitism. I’m currently a 5th-year Ph.D. student with Vanessa Ezenwa in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Yale. My work focuses on the role that behavior - particularly social interactions and movement ecology - play in shaping disease outcomes in wildlife, and how parasites in turn shape their host's behavior. I'm interested in better understanding how these feedbacks scale-up to shape epidemics, social dynamics, and host ecology.

This site is under active development as I add content over the coming weeks. Please let me know if you find any errors!

Updates

[Winter 2025] Work I led with Scott Yanco and Walter Jetz was published in Ecology Letters. Super excited to have this out, and even more excited about the projects that stem from it! Read more here.
[Winter 2025] website for the Move Disease Archive is launched! I am a collaborator on this project with Dongmin Kim and Kevin Morelle, and excited about the ability to merge movement and disease processes.
[Fall 2025] MoveBon - the Animal Movement Biodiversity Observation Network - is official. This is an extremely promising initiative to integrate movement data in broader biodiversity monitoring frameworks. I was incredibly lucky to be a member of this workshop back in March 2025, and multiple working groups stemming from this initiative.
[Fall 2025] Work with Timm Wild and co. at MPI-AB was pre-printed and submitted to Movement Ecology - this work validates a proximity logging platform based on WiFi, and also explores how contexts like tag orientation and weather impact proximity logging. This sets up some very exciting work going forward on buffalo social interactions simultaneous with proximity detection!
[Summer 2025] Work I was lucky to contribute to was published in PNAS. Congratz Muyang, and check out the paper here!
[Summer 2025] I presented work on buffalo social networks, tuberculosis infection risk, and physiological responses to infection at EEID at the University of Notre Dame
[Spring 2025] Robin Bauknecht, a Masters student I had the joy of co-advising is off to bigger and better things! He will join Rob Fletcher's group at Cambridge. We are now working to finalize some exciting work to understand the effect of movement on spatial distributions in Whooping Cranes!
[Spring 2025] I presented work on buffalo social-disease dynamics at the Yale Vector-borne and Zoonotic Disease Symposium
[Fall 2024] I presented work on buffalo social networks and their role in tuberculosis dynamics at EEB Graduate Student Symposium - great feedback and won best student presentation
[Summer 2024] We finalized field captures with more than 500 total buffalo captured, tested, and released! I tagged 380 of these with GPS ear tags, and excited to analyze buffalo movements! We also wrapped up our work with captive buffalo, and I'll be busy collating and analyzing terabytes of video data from these trials :)
[Fall 2023] We began the first of two field captures with more than 200 buffalo captured, tested, and released! This gave me the opportunity to tag many of these individuals with GPS ear tags, and super excited to work with this data.
[Spring 2023] With Vanessa Ezenwa, we received funding from Yale Planetary Solutions to investigate how to remotely-sense buffalo social dynamics as a lens into infectious disease dynamics.