Bringing together well-established strengths such as veterinary medicine, agriculture and ecology with its new College of Public Health has uniquely positioned the University of Georgia to tackle growing threats from new diseases.

Today, three out of every four emerging infectious diseases are transmitted from animals to humans. As a result, understanding the relationship between animal and human health has become more urgent. Discovering how these pathogens move from one species to another, how they behave in their host population, or how changes in their environment affects them can help save human lives.

UGA is answering the call by strategically building a new research agenda that capitalizes on the intersection of established individual strengths and bridges to other research agencies and universities. The university is just one of three in the nation pooling the resources of a veterinary medicine college and a public health college to build an infectious disease research program, according to Harry Dickerson, associate dean for infectious diseases in the veterinary college.

New insights from such multidisciplinary collaboration is yielding results that could avert an avian flu pandemic, produce a better tuberculosis vaccine and a reliable test for latent TB, or discover how West Nile Virus moves between species. Along the way, research initiatives and academic programs are training young scientists to confront tomorrow's zoonotic diseases.

Global. And Local.
UGA's work is often global in nature, as in the search for a TB test and vaccine and exchanges of students and faculty with nations from Vietnam to Uganda. The strengths the university has built in faculty expertise and research facilities helps draw scientists from around the world to discover solutions to global threats.

But land-grant UGA's collaborative public health work is also firmly grounded in serving the special needs of the state of Georgia.  The Cooperative Extension service in UGA's College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences gives public health researchers a natural local network for partnerships.

UGA infectious disease faculty are also collaborating with the CDC, Georgia Tech, Emory and the Medical College of Georgia. This spirit of cooperation is fueling the bid to bring the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility to Georgia.

Points of Pride
With these resources working together, UGA is poised to play a substantial role in health challenges both global and local:
> the largest avian medicine faculty of any institution in the world
> the largest group of parasitologists in the world under one roof (about 30)
> two Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholars in infectious disease
> the only university with joint appointments in infectious disease, veterinary medicine and ecology
> one of only five universities with a joint Doctor of Veterinary Medicine-Master of Public Health degree
> the Southeast Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, a unique cooperative for wildlife disease surveillance in 16 states, based at UGA's vet school.
> the only containment lab on a university campus to meet federal biosafety level 3 agricultural (BSL-3-Ag) requirements and one of three labs in the southeast with permission to work with select agents (the Animal Health Research Center at UGA)

A Whole Greater than Its Parts
Use these links to explore some of the contributing units that add up to a sum greater than its parts.

Unique Facilities
High-security and state-of-the-art facilities on campus help draw top faculty and give them collaborative spaces. The Coverdell Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences is the centerpiece of UGA's  interdisciplinary biomedical enterprise. Much of UGA's work to identify diseases and find tests, vaccines and treatments for them happens in the unique state-of-the-art laboratories of UGA's College of Veterinary Medicine. The Animal Health Research Center allows UGA scientists to safely study diseases such as avian influenza that affect animal and human populations in this BSL-3-Ag containment lab.

Faculty of Infectious Disease
Established in 2007 to bring together researchers from across the campus to study infectious disease threats and develop ways to prevent, detect and treat them. Its almost 80 members span ecology, physics, public health, public administration,  microbiology, cellular biology, veterinary medicine, forestry, agricultural engineering  and more -- plus associate members from other universities and research agencies.

College of Veterinary Medicine Department of Infectious Disease
The department offers master's and doctoral degrees in infectious disease and focuses its research on diseases that affect both animals and humans.

College of Public Health
With a land-grant mission to develop community-based research and service projects to serve the health needs of the state, the College also sees economic development applications for its work to improve Georgia's health status rankings and public health workforce.

Odum School of Ecology
The nation's first freestanding school of ecology builds on the legacy of Eugene Odum, who is often known as the "father of modern ecology." The rapidly expanding discipline of disease ecology studies how infectious diseases spread through host populations, and how hosts and pathogens evolve in response to one another. One recent study includes a map of global hotspots for emerging infectious diseases such as HIV, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus and Ebola.

Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources
Faculty from this oldest public forestry school in the United States also collaborate on infectious disease research, particularly through fisheries and aquaculture and wildlife ecology programs.

Southeast Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study
A unit of the veterinary college that also relies on UGA's resources in ecology and forestry, this unique cooperative contracts with 16 states to survey wildlife populations for infectious disease.

College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
With research initiatives that investigate everything from parasites and pests to food safety, UGA's agriculture faculty are an integral part of infectious disease research. The college's statewide Cooperative Extension service provides a two-way research network. Scientists discover knowledge, then extension agents take it to farmers and homeowners to put into use. Those individuals and businesses also identify new problems and bring them to extension agents, who take them back to researchers to find solutions. 

Center for Tropical and Emerging Diseases
UGA researchers from several departments are doing advanced work on parasitic diseases that kill millions worldwide and pose an increasing threat to the United States, particularly in the South.