Disease ecology focuses on understanding how infectious diseases spread through and impact host populations, and how hosts and pathogens react and evolve in response to one another.

The rapidly expanding discipline of disease ecology draws on the strengths of researchers in the biomedical, agricultural, veterinary and environmental sciences. The University of Georgia is uniquely strong in these areas and is poised to play a substantial role in global health challenges. We possess well developed programs exploring developmental biology, glycomics, genomics, bacteriology, virology, parasitology, immunology, and cell biology. These disciplines have resulted in the synthesis of a body of knowledge explaining pathogen natural history and within host mechanisms of infection.

News:
John Drake, assistant professor in the School of Ecology, and colleagues
are awarded one of eight grants from the Ecology of Infectious Diseases
program. They will study the West Nile Virus in New York City and its
spread over the past seven years.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=110502

The University of Georgia has world-renowned veterinary scientists with extensive expertise in diseases of domestic animals, wildlife, poultry and fish. The university's wildlife disease unit, the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, represents a major asset because it serves a dual mission of infectious disease research and surveillance. Similarly, UGA's departments of Plant Pathology and Veterinary Pathology routinely solve disease problems as related to agriculture. To top it all, UGA also serves as the home base of the internationally-recognized Institute of Ecology which for the past 50 years has established links between the ecology of organisms and their ecosystems by providing mechanisms for predicting the consequences of human induced land-use changes for the spread and evolution of infectious agents. The Warnell School of Forest Resources and the Department of Marine Sciences possess significant strengths in organismal ecology including outstanding microbiologists, herpetologists, ichthyologists and ornithologists, while the Department of Entomology has extensive expertise in insect vectors of disease.

Collaborative efforts have resulted in extramurally-funded research programs in tropical diseases (departments of Cell Biology, Microbiology, Entomology, Ecology, Infectious Diseases and Food Science), interaction between infectious diseases and world poverty (departments of Economics and Ecology), ecology of emerging infections (departments of Population Health and Ecology), and the evolution of antibiotic resistance (departments of Microbiology, Ecology and Population Health). These efforts involve over 50 faculty members from six colleges and numerous departments at UGA.

To highlight three projects that received international recognition: Dr. Richard Tarleton’s groundbreaking work on proteomics of trypanosomes was published in and featured on the cover of Science; Drs. Ann Summers, John Maurer and Charles Hofacre’s study of the ecology of antibiotic resistance in poultry production was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and featured in Discovery; and Dr. Pejman Rohani’s article demonstrating interference among unrelated infections was published in Nature. These demonstrate the depth and breadth of the ecology of infectious disease research at the University of Georgia. 

• NSF/NIH
  Ecology of Infectious Diseases

• IH-NIGMS
  Evolution of Infectious Diseases

• IH-NIGMS
  Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study

• IH-NIAID
  Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease Research Opportunities

• PA
  National Center for Environmental Research

• SDA-NRI
  Epidemiology of Food Safety

• IH
  Novel Approaches to Study Polymicrobial Diseases

• IH-NCCAM
  Probiotics for Pediatric Illnesses

• SDA/NSF
  Interagency Microbial Observatories

• SDA-NRI
  Biology of Plant/Microbe Associations

• SDA-CSREES
  Integrated Research, Education, and Extension Competitive Grants Program: National Integrated Food Safety Initiative

This page contains audio or video interviews with researchers, administrators, and government officials involved in disease ecology. It also contains links to news article interviews.

Transmissible Diseases of Butterflies
A video interview with Dr. Sonia Altizer,  Assistant Professor of Ecology

 

MARGIE D. LEE DVM, Ph.D.
706-583-0797
0123 PDRC MAIN BUILDING
ATHENS, GA 30605
POPULATION HEALTH
leem@vet.uga.edu PROFESSOR