Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics
The CIDD integrates genetic, immunological, ecological and other studies to understand how disease processes work, and how they inter-relate across scales:
- from the sub-cellular to the meta-population level
- from ecological to evolutionary timescales
CIDD research ranges from investigating development of disease agents within hosts, to characterizing and predicting their spread through populations in time and space.
Our research addresses issues of fundamental importance in biology. For instance:
- Many disease agents have a sufficiently short generation time that ecological and evolutionary dynamics operate on similar timescales. Consequently, host-parasite relationships provide a tractable system for investigating key questions in population and evolutionary biology.
- Though their interactions with host immunity are complex, some disease agents have small enough genomes that we can begin to dissect the molecular basis of important large-scale phenomena such as species barriers to transmission and herd immunity.
Infectious diseases have an immense impact on human health, agriculture and conservation. CIDD research has considerable relevance to management and control of pressing disease issues such as disease emergence, bio- and agro-terrorism and epidemic control strategies.
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