The emergence and spread of infectious diseases is a major, growing, and increasingly complex global challenge. As the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, addressing it requires expertise and tools from disciplines ranging from public health to ecology to statistics. A new initiative at the University of Georgia is designed to build on the university’s existing strength in those fields with the addition of eight new faculty positions in the area of artificial intelligence, data science and the dynamics of infectious diseases.

As home to the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases and Institute of Bioinformatics, the University of Georgia is already one of the world’s leading centers of infectious disease research. The new faculty positions will add key areas of expertise in modeling, machine learning and other cutting-edge computational tools.

“These timely additions to the UGA faculty will expand our capacity to tackle the growing threat of infectious diseases,” said John Drake, Distinguished Research Professor in the Odum School of Ecology and director of the CEID. “They will allow us to engage in new areas of research and gain a more holistic understanding of infectious disease dynamics that can inform efforts to prepare against and prevent future epidemics.”

The new positions will be cross-disciplinary in nature and will be based in units across campus, including the College of Public Health, College of Engineering, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and Odum School of Ecology.

“The cross-disciplinary aspect of the initiative will enable us provide new data science perspectives on the challenges of infectious disease forecasting, from data collection, curation, and validation to the limitations of models, as well as the uncertainty of the forecast,” said T. N. Sriram, Professor and Head of the Department of Statistics.

The new faculty members will also enhance UGA’s instructional capacity at both the graduate and undergraduate level.

The eight positions in the Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Dynamics of Infectious Diseases cluster are:

Tenured or tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Associate or Full Professor: Quantitative disease ecology, to be based in the Odum School of Ecology. This position will focus on computational analysis of pathogen or parasite transmission, mathematical modeling, and/or phylodynamic methods applied to diseases of global concern including zoonoses, emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, diseases impacting humans, livestock or endangered species. This position will also serve as the associate director of the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases.
Start date: August 2022. Search is currently open.

Tenured or tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Associate or Full Professor: Epidemic modeling and forecasting, to be based in the department of statistics, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. This position will specialize in the use of artificial intelligence and time series modeling that combines machine/deep learning methods, mechanistic epidemic modeling, modern causal inference, and semiparametric and Bayesian methods for spatiotemporal modeling of disease transmission.
Start date: August 2022. Search is currently open.

Tenured or tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor: Application of artificial intelligence to the study of infectious disease dynamics, to be based in the School of Chemical, Materials and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering. This position will focus on nonlinear dynamical systems, which are at the heart of many applications in science and engineering and are central to the understanding of epidemics.
Start date: August 2022. Search is currently open.

Tenured or tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Associate or Full Professor: Biostatistics and machine learning applied to infectious diseases, to be based in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics, College of Public Health. This position will focus on novel, innovative methodology (e.g., computational biostatistics, machine learning, and data analytics) and applications to study the spread and control of infectious diseases.
Start date: August 2022. Search is currently open.

Tenured or tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor: Modeling, statistics, and analytics of infectious disease processes, to be based in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics, College of Public Health. This position will be centered on infectious disease modeling and data analytics at both the individual and populations, with a special focus on population immunity.
Start date: August 2022. Search is currently open.

Faculty (any rank), agent-based modeling, to be based in the School of Chemical, Materials and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering. This position will specialize in understanding the impact of fine-grained heterogeneities on disease transmission and containment, including issues of spatial scale, population mixing, human mobility, and the structure of the physical environment through agent-based modeling.
Start date: August 2023.

Assistant or associate professor, biosurveillance of infectious diseases, to be based in the department of statistics, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. This position will specialize in the use of machine/deep learning and natural languages processing to improve accuracy and efficiency in biosurveillance and public health practices.
Start date: August 2023.

Assistant professor, network science of multi-host pathogens, to be based in the Odum School of Ecology. This position is designed for a quantitative community ecologist specializing in the use of algorithms for simulating and characterizing interactions in ecological meta-communities and quantifying cross-species transmission risk.
Start date: August 2023.

The Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Dynamics of Infectious Diseases cluster is part of the UGA Presidential Interdisciplinary Faculty Hiring Initiative in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, which aims to add 50 faculty members in eight focal areas over the next two years.

For more information, visit https://www.ceid.uga.edu/idd/.