Home / Research Areas / Infectious Disease & Host-Pathogen Networks
One Pathogen, Two Networks — The Cell It Hijacks, and the People It Spreads Between
At the molecular scale, a virus or bacterium succeeds by hijacking the internal signaling network of the cells it infects. At the population scale, an infectious disease spreads across a network of human contact. This pathway trains you to think in networks at both scales at once.
From a Single Cell to an Entire Outbreak
This area trains students to map how a pathogen interacts with host cell proteins, and to model how infections spread across networks of people — both essential to understanding outbreaks, designing treatments, and targeting public health interventions effectively.
— Build host-pathogen interaction networks showing which host proteins a virus or bacterium hijacks or disables
— Study immune response dynamics — how the body's defense mounts, escalates, and resolves a response over time
— Model disease transmission across contact networks, including how structure affects how fast and how far an outbreak spreads
— Evaluate network-informed intervention strategies, like which individuals would be most effective to vaccinate or isolate
Why It Matters
From Molecular Mechanism to Public Health Impact
Understanding exactly how a pathogen disrupts host cell biology directly informs where new antiviral or antibacterial drugs should target. Understanding how diseases spread across real contact networks — rather than assuming everyone mixes randomly — has repeatedly proven critical for effective outbreak response, resource allocation, and public health policy, including during major recent outbreaks.
What a Summer Project Looks Like
Infectious Disease & Host-Pathogen Networks
Mapping How a Pathogen Hijacks the Cell: A Host-Pathogen Interaction Network Analysis
A student selects a well-studied pathogen and uses public host-pathogen interaction data to build a network showing which human proteins the pathogen is known to interact with. They analyze this network to identify which host cellular processes are most heavily targeted, and investigate whether the affected host proteins point toward known or candidate drug targets for treating the infection. As an extension, the project can incorporate a simple network-based transmission model to explore how outbreak dynamics change depending on the structure of the underlying contact network. Mentored by an infectious disease researcher or epidemiologist, the student produces a written report and a network visualization connecting molecular findings to their broader public health implications.
Immune response dynamics
Epidemiological network simulation
Public health translation
Course by Track
How Each Level Gets There
Every track takes a shared Fall foundations course, then this area-specific Spring course, then a live mentored summer project.
High School
HS-S-ID
Undergraduate
UG-S-ID
Medical Student
MS-S-ID
Clinician
CL-S-ID
Not sure this is the right area for you? Explore all six research areas →