REU Site: Population Biology of Infectious Diseases

This REU Site award to the University of Georgia (UGA), located in Athens, GA, will support the training of 10 undergraduate students for 10 weeks during each summer in 2027 - 2029. It is anticipated that a total of 30 students will be trained in the program. Students will be immersed in an interdisciplinary environment and trained by mentors to conduct research at the frontiers of infectious disease ecology. Students will investigate research questions from a range of experimental and quantitative perspectives, including field-based, lab-based, mathematical, and computational approaches to better understand causes and consequences of infectious disease. The research projects will use different systems to analyze disease including genes and cells, whole organisms, host populations, and broader ecological communities. Program activities will include student-led lab tours, research presentations, paper discussions, computational workshops, and a final research symposium. Students will learn how research is conducted by actively engaging in all phases of project development, and many students will present their work externally at professional scientific conferences and/or earn co-authorship on peer-reviewed scientific publications. Assessment of this program will be completed through the Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment (URSSA), supplemented by specialized annual surveys administered by program directors. Students should apply to the REU site using NSF ETAP (Education and Training Application: https://etap.nsf.gov). The training students will receive is aligned with the NSF priorities in Biotechnology and AI. Infectious diseases are one of the greatest contemporary threats to the health of humans, livestock, wildlife, and crops. Critically, infectious disease dynamics occur across scales of organization ranging from genes and cells to populations and ecosystems. Addressing these complex dynamics often requires a combination of empirical and quantitative expertise. This program supports transformative research and student training at the intersections of the quantitative sciences (mathematics, computer science, statistics) and empirical disciplines of host-pathogen biology (ecology, epidemiology, genetics, immunology, microbiology). Demand for quantitatively-skilled health professionals, researchers and policymakers with expertise in infectious diseases will remain high in the decades to come. The students trained by this program will better understand the advantages of collaborative research and will be better prepared for a range of careers in infectious disease biology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.