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 important public health issues, the Disease Ecology Lab needs your financial support to advance research on Lyme Disease and other infectious diseases, such as West Nile Virus. Students in the lab conduct research on ticks, mosquitoes, small mammal reservoir hosts, pathogenic bacteria, viruses, and birds and their malaria parasites.
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, like ticks and mosquitos, influence the spread and risk of disease
Dr. Vincenzo Ellis heads the Disease Ecology Lab, which includes five graduate and two undergraduate students and has trained over 15 undergraduate students. Dr. Ellis and his team understand the importance of preventing and controlling infectious diseases and the demand for strategies to reduce the suffering of individuals who fall victim to these diseases.
The Disease Ecology Lab combines fieldwork with state-of-the-art laboratory and computational approaches to confirm where pathogens exist and determine how they evolve and spread. The Disease Ecology Lab has existing and critical unfunded projects. Your financial support will ensure that critical research continues at an expedited pace and that students have funding to travel to conferences and present their research.
Donor Impact: How your support makes a difference!
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 of tomorrow, giving our graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in novel research and present their results at conferences. Your support of the Disease Ecology Lab is critical to advancing the prevention of Lyme Disease and other infectious diseases. Every individual gift, no matter how small, will allow the Disease Ecology Lab to continue this work to benefit everyone who is at risk from Lyme Disease, West Nile virus or other pathogen-caused illnesses. Please join us in this urgent endeavor.
