Center for Disease Control Awards Training Grant in Vector-Borne Diseases to Colorado State University

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded a Fellowship Training Program grant to Colorado State University’s Arthropod-borne Infectious Disease Laboratory in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

The grant provides almost $250,000 per year for five years to train graduate students in medical entomology, arbovirology, microbiology, and vector borne diseases. The ultimate purpose of this funding is to improve the ability of the United States public health system to effectively respond to the problem of vector-borne infectious diseases by increasing the number of specialists with demonstrated field- and laboratory-based skills.

"We’re very grateful to the CDC for this award. Being selected for one of these grants says quite a lot about the quality of our research, our facilities and our scientists," said Barry Beaty, University Distinguished Professor and former head of the AIDL at Colorado State. ‘This award complements the funding we just received from NIH to form, in partnership with the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, an Emerging Virus Disease Unit and demonstrates the importance of this kind of research."

Carol Blair, former chair of department of microbiology, is co-program director on the grant, which also includes an illustrious roster of internationally recognized researchers and AIDL faculty, including William Black, Dr. Richard Bowen, Charles Calisher, Jon Carlson, Joel Hutcheson and the director of AIDL, Ken Olson.

The more than thirty researchers at the Arthropod-born Infectious Disease Laboratory at Colorado State concentrate on the prevention, diagnosis and control of mosquito-borne encephalitis, yellow fever, dengue, Hantaviruses, parasitic diseases, and Lyme disease. Researchers at AIDL regularly collaborate with researchers at the Fort Collins laboratory of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – Division of Vector-borne Infectious Diseases and the U.S. Department of Agriculture – Arthropod-borne Animal Diseases Research Laboratory in Laramie, Wyo., which provides an unparalleled training experience in vector borne disease for the students at CSU.

The CDC grants are part of the "Healthy People 2010" initiative, which is designed to make dramatic progress in improving the health of America’s population over the next ten years.