The University of Georgia 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.
Because of its unique strengths in these fields essential to disease ecology, UGA is poised to play a substantial role in understanding these global health challenges. The goal of the Biomedical and Health Science Institute’s initiative in disease ecology is to identify, acknowledge and facilitate the university’s cutting edge work in the infectious disease ecology.
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.
- IH-NIGMS
Evolution of Infectious Diseases
- SDA-NRI
Epidemiology of Food Safety
- IH-NCCAM
Probiotics for Pediatric Illnesses
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