Patrick Stephens, an assistant research scientist in the Odum School of Ecology, received $120,280 from the National Science Foundation to create a research coordination network that will bring together internationally recognized experts from ecology, conservation medicine, parasitology and computational sciences to quantify and explore the drivers of global scale patterns of pathogen biodiversity. The network also will develop and maintain databases of global infectious disease biodiversity and make these data freely available to the academic community and the general public. Co-principal investigators are Robert Poulin, University of Ontago, New Zealand; Sonia Altizer, UGA Odum School of Ecology; Katherine Smith, Brown University; and Alonso Aguirre, George Mason University.