aboutAbout CIDD: from proteins to pandemics
CIDD is a "virtual" center bringing together theoreticians and empirical scientists in a wide variety of disciplines to collaborate and innovate in the area of infectious disease research.
An interdisciplinary approach
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.
Value
The diversity of expertise in CIDD, and the close working relationships we foster, mean that we share information and ideas in innovative and productive ways.
Investigation of key biological questions
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.
By collaborating across different disciplines, CIDD researchers cast important biological problems and processes in useful new lights.
Application to disease management and control
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.