$2.5 million grant funds study of how infectious diseases become epidemics

Two Kansas State University researchers are exploring how diseases spread across long distances in an effort to learn how to better control the next human, animal or plant epidemic. Caterina Scoglio, professor of electrical and computer engineering and Faryad Darabi Sahneh, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, are part of a larger group including colleagues from Oregon State University, North Carolina State University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and two universities in England. The group was awarded a $2.5 million grant through the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases, or EEID, program jointly funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health and the U.K.’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. The program supports projects that study how large-scale environmental events such as habitat destruction or pollution alter risks of viral, parasitic and bacterial disease emergence. The...