Sonia Altizer
Sonia M. Altizer (born 1970) is a Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and the Athletic Association Professor of Ecology in the University of Georgia, Odum School of Ecology. Early life. Altizer was born as the daughter of Jim and Chris Altizer of Watkinsville, Georgia. Her passion for biology and the natural world began when she received a gift of a microscope and a grown-your-own-butterflies kit on her twelfth birthday. Education. Altizer received a B.S. from Duke University in 1992 and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1998. She also did a  postdoctoral work at Princeton University and Cornell University. Career. For 20 years since a graduate student of the University of Minnesota, Altizer traveled the world to study monarch butterfly migration, ecology, and interactions with a protozoan parasite. She has researched how seasonal migration of these butterflies affects parasite transmission, and also developed collaborative databases of mammalian infectious diseases, on host behavior, ecology, and life history interact with global-scale patterns of parasitism. She also focused her research on songbird-pathogen dynamics, including studies of house finch conjunctivitis, West Nile virus, and salmonellosis. Altizer has published several publications and she recently  co-edited a book that would be published in 2015, titled Monarchs in a Changing World: Biology and Conservation of an Iconic Insect. She also and participated in high-level task forces dedicated to monarch butterfly conservation. A citizen science project called Monarch Health is run by her students at University of Georgia, which is now the eighth year. There are hundreds of volunteers across North America in sampling wild monarchs for a debilitating disease. Research areas. Altizer's research interests are ecology of infectious diseases in natural populations, evolution of host resistance and parasite virulence, insect ecology and evolution , animal migrations, and anthropogenic change and infectious disease dynamics. Personal life. When Altizer is not on campus or traveling for work, she rides on her horse in rural Watkinsville with her husband, with whom she has two sons. External links. Category:ISI highly cited researchers