Ten new grants totaling $25 million, were awarded through the interagency Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID) program, a partnership between NSF https://beta.nsf.gov, NIH, USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, https://nifa.usda.gov and U.K Research and Innovation https://ukri.org.
The partnership will support studies of infectious diseases. Five grants were funded by NSF, three by NIH, and two by USDA-NIFA. Four of the projects include collaborations between researchers in the U.S and the UK.
The EEID program performs interdisciplinary research on the ecological, evolutionary, physiological, and social processes that drive infectious disease transmission. For example, research funded through EEID laid the groundwork for modeling used to understand and predict the initial spread of COVID-19 and has helped identify transmission patterns such as the 2013 identification of bats as the source of the 2002 SARS outbreak.
Joanne Tornow, NSF Assistant Director for Biological Sciences, reports “The adaption of the pathogen that enables new strains of COVID-19 which have higher levels of transmission, highlights the need to understand the role of evolution and other factors in disease transmission not only for COVID-19 but what could possibly cause the next epidemic or pandemic.”
The grants will also support research on:
- How climate change impacts drivers of disease in marine life
- How pathogen dynamics are linked across biological scales from the cellular to the ecosystem level
- How human behavior and actions affect disease transmission between animals, humans, and within human populations
- How the interplay among the ecology, behavior, and immunology of parasites impacts transmission
The awards will foster a better understanding of how a form of cancer found in marine bivalves is transmitted across distances and between species and how microbes contribute to the infection of ticks that transmit Lyme disease.