Welcome

The Center for Infection and Immunity, located at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, is dedicated to promoting global health through innovative research and training programs in infectious disease. Our focus is on pathogen surveillance and discovery along with understanding how genes and the environment contribute to health and disease.

Our international team of laboratory and field scientists monitors known and novel pathogens in more than 40 countries to anticipate and reduce the impact of infectious diseases. To do this effectively, we developed a toolkit of molecular techniques that allow us to obtain the genetic fingerprints of microbes, making their identification faster and more reliable. 

Public education and building a public health system capable of rapidly managing national and international health threats are core elements of the Center’s mission. Our scientists have worked with the Federal government to streamline how pathogens are identified, advised the White House on how to strengthen the nation’s public health system, and trained local workers in developing nations on how to collect samples and detect pathogens with state-of-the-art techniques.

Our work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wired, Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Discover, the History Channel, National Geographic, National Public Radio, Nature Medicine, This Week in Virology and Steven Soderbergh’s new film Contagion.

 

FEATURED VIDEO

CII Director Ian Lipkin discusses bringing science to the big screen.

Video courtesy of the Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Medical Center