IDEEL@UNC (Infectious Disease, Epidemiology and Ecology Lab at University of North Carolina) was formed in 2015 by a group of principal investigators who shared a vision for improving the health of the world's poorest populations by improving our understanding of the infectious diseases that impact them most. The idea was to provide a platform to promote collaborative interdisciplinary research to tackle issues about how pathogens interact with human hosts. Investigators come from a wide-breadth of backgrounds including infectious disease physicians, epidemiologists, molecular parasitologists, cell biologists, geneticist and geographers.