Ecology of Infectious Diseases | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Ecology of Infectious Diseases (EID) program is a research grant opportunity aimed at improving how we understand, explain, and ultimately predict infectious disease transmission. The core purpose is to support studies that build predictive models and uncover general principles that govern transmission dynamics. In practice, this means the program is looking for proposals that go beyond describing a single outbreak and instead tackle the underlying ecological and evolutionary processes that shape when, where, and how pathogens spread across environments, hosts, and communities.

A central theme of the opportunity is ecology in the broadest sense, including ecological, evolutionary, and socio-ecological drivers of disease. Projects are expected to investigate how transmission is influenced by vectors (such as mosquitoes, ticks, or other carriers), abiotic or environmental agents (such as water, soil, or other nonliving pathways), and the population dynamics of reservoir species that maintain pathogens in nature. NSF is also interested in work that connects these biological processes to real-world outcomes, including transmission to humans, other animals, or plants. Importantly, the program explicitly welcomes research that incorporates cultural, social, behavioral, and economic factors that shape disease dynamics, risk, communication, and response, recognizing that transmission is often as much about human behavior and systems as it is about microbes and hosts.

The program supports a wide range of disease systems and settings. Proposed research can address zoonotic diseases (those that move between animals and humans), vector-borne diseases, and enteric diseases, and it can be conducted in terrestrial, freshwater, or marine environments. NSF also makes clear that projects may be framed at any scale, from narrow work focused on a specific pathogen and its hosts to more comprehensive, system-level studies that include environmental change, community composition, and broader ecosystem interactions. The scope explicitly includes diseases of non-human animals and plants, not only human health, which aligns with the program's ecological and cross-species perspective.

A key eligibility constraint is that diseases affecting humans must include an environmental transmission component. In other words, research that focuses only on direct human-to-human transmission, without a meaningful environmental, vector, reservoir, or other ecological pathway, is not considered a good fit and is not eligible for EID support. This requirement reflects the program's mission to fund infectious disease research where environment, ecology, and coupled human-natural systems are central to transmission and risk.

NSF signals particular interest in proposals addressing disease systems that matter for developing countries and in projects relevant to agriculture. That emphasis suggests the program values work with strong global health or food-system relevance, especially where ecological conditions, land use, climate, water systems, wildlife-livestock interfaces, or resource constraints influence transmission and control options. While not required, the announcement strongly encourages investigators to build genuine connections to the public health research community. The examples given include collaborations or participation by epidemiologists, physicians, veterinarians, social scientists, medical entomologists, pathologists, virologists, and parasitologists, reflecting a preference for interdisciplinary teams that can connect ecological theory and modeling with disease surveillance, clinical insight, field sampling, laboratory diagnostics, and human behavior.

Administratively, this opportunity is offered as a discretionary grant program under NSF, categorized as Science and Technology and other Research and Development. It is identified as Funding Opportunity Number 10-616, posted September 15, 2010, with a full proposal deadline of December 15, 2010. NSF anticipated making about 8 awards, with an estimated total funding amount of $10,000,000. Individual awards could range from as little as $1 up to a ceiling of $2,500,000, and there is no cost-sharing or matching requirement. Eligibility is listed as unrestricted, meaning proposals can come from any type of entity, subject to any additional eligibility clarifications in the full solicitation (NSF Publication 10-616). The funding is associated with multiple CFDA numbers spanning Geosciences (47.050), Biological Sciences (47.074), Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (47.075), and International Research and Research Training (93.989), which matches the program's explicit interdisciplinary emphasis.

Overall, the EID opportunity is best understood as NSF's call for integrative infectious disease science rooted in ecology: projects that combine field and/or laboratory data with modeling, that explain transmission as an outcome of environmental conditions and host-vector-reservoir dynamics, and that, where relevant, incorporate the social and economic realities that determine exposure and spread. For applicants, the clearest path to competitiveness is a proposal that is strongly mechanistic, predictive, and interdisciplinary, with ecological transmission at its center and a disease system where environmental context is essential rather than incidental.

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