Training Workshops on the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases

新出现的传染病对人类和自然群落中的其他动物和植物构成了广泛的挑战。预测新出现疾病的影响将需要综合生态学、流行病学、遗传学和进化数据，解决方案必须解决诸如流行病、物种跳跃、耐药性以及免疫和疫苗接种的作用等问题。传染病研究的前沿将随着数学模型的发展和基因组计划收集数据的巨大能力而移动。这就要求在培养下一代科学家方面进行一步的改变，将生态学和进化论的定量分析与流行病学和生物医学的更传统的分析结合起来。该项目将资助讲习班，培训下一代传染病研究人员进行定量分析，组建跨学科小组，综合日益堆积的数据，并将生态学、进化学、基因组学、流行病学、微生物学/寄生虫学和免疫学方面的研究联系起来。该项目将采用灵活的课程，将最先进的建模方法与讲习班参与者提供的数据集分析相结合。更广泛的影响包括将不同背景的学生和教师聚集在一起，并通过有针对性的招聘培训来自代表性不足群体的学生。培训产生的合作项目将导致公共卫生和流行病学方面的进展，包括了解在人口变化、药物治疗、疫苗接种战略和全球变化的情况下病原体的出现。

Emerging infectious diseases present a broad challenge to humans, other animals and plants, in both human-dominated and natural communities. Anticipating effects of emerging diseases will require synthesis of ecological, epidemiological, genetic, and evolutionary data, and solutions must address issues such as pandemics, species jumps, drug resistance, and roles of immunity and vaccination. The leading edge of infectious disease research will move with development of mathematical models and the enormous capacity of genome projects to gather data. This demands a step change in training the next generation of scientists, by integrating quantitative analysis from ecology and evolution with more traditional analyses in epidemiology and biomedicine. This project will fund workshops to train the next generation of infectious disease researchers in quantitative analyses, to form interdisciplinary teams to synthesize the growing mountain of data, and to link research in ecology, evolution, genomics, epidemiology, microbiology/parasitology, and immunology. The project will use a flexible curriculum integrating state-of-the-art modeling approaches with analysis of data sets provided by workshop participants.Broader impacts include bringing together students and instructors with diverse backgrounds, and training students from underrepresented groups by targeted recruiting. Collaborative projects arising from the training will lead to advances in public health and epidemiology, including understanding of pathogen emergence in the face of changing human populations, drug therapies, vaccination strategies, and global change.