About this project:
Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States are treated for Lyme Disease every year. Furthermore, tick and mosquito-transmitted infectious diseases are becoming more common. To address these public health threats, the Disease Ecology Lab needs your financial support to advance research on Lyme Disease and other infectious diseases, such as West Nile Virus.
- The Disease Ecology Lab’s research addresses important issues including:
- How and why Lyme disease spreads at different rates in different places
- Potential controls to curb the spread of Lyme Disease
- How and why pathogens spread from animals to humans
- How the ecology and evolution of pathogens, their hosts, and their vectors influence the spread and risk of disease
Vincenzo Ellis heads the Disease Ecology Lab, which currently includes 5 graduate and 2 undergraduate students and has trained and provided research experiences to >20 undergraduate students. Students in the lab conduct research on ticks, mosquitoes, small mammal reservoir hosts, pathogenic bacteria, viruses and malaria parasites of wildlife.
The Disease Ecology Lab combines fieldwork with laboratory and computational approaches to confirm where pathogens exist and determine how they evolve and spread.
How your support makes a difference!
The Disease Ecology Lab has existing and critical unfunded projects. Your gift will ensure that our research and educational outreach continues at an expedited pace and that students have funding to attend workshops, travel to conferences and present their research.
Your support helps us stay at the forefront of research innovation by offsetting the costs of genome sequencing and pathogen surveillance. Equally as important, your financial support helps train the scientists and educators of tomorrow, giving our graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in novel research and present their results at conferences.
