Instructor | Tad Dallas

Location | Coker Life Sciences 202

Times | T & TH 10:05am - 11:20am

Drop-in hours | Th from 1:00pm - 2:30pm

All notes, labs, and slides are available either on this website, or within the GitHub repository

Course Overview:

Parasitism is the most common trophic strategy on Earth, with incredibly variation in their life histories (e.g., intestinal helminth parasites, viruses, ectoparasites like ticks and fleas, etc. etc.). This diversity of life history types leads to differences in the number of host species they infect and the resulting consequences on the host itself. This course introduces major issues and advances in the ecology of infectious diseases. Specifically, we will cover parasite functional and taxonomic diversity, variation in transmission dynamics, parasite virulence and co-evolution of hosts and parasites, host-parasite networks, spatial and environmental gradients of host specificity, and the process of disease emergence in human and wildlife systems.

Approach

Students are expected to come to class with the conceptual background in the topic of the lecture, as the lectures will focus on skill-building and the analysis of biological data. Students will be expected to work collaboratively in and out of class, and course content and grading will emphasize communication and reproducibility of an analysis as much as scientific or technical completeness. That being said, there are numerous ways to programmatically solve the same problem, and I do not expect to see the same code from multiple people. The Course Syllabus provides an overview of the modules and topics covered as well as links to weekly reading, assignments, and any lecture material. This syllabus is preliminary and always subject to change.

Texts

There is no required textbook for this course. We will read primary literature articles every week, which will complement the course notes and be integrated into both in-class quizzes and the exams.

Course design

This website was inspired by Carl Boetigger’s ESPM 157 course at UC Berkeley. Without his willingness to keep his course materials open access, and without the open source tools to build the website, this course would have to be created from scratch. The content would surely have suffered.