Dr. Escobar’s research focuses on the application of ecology and biogeography to the study of infectious diseases. The Escobar laboratory explores suitable theoretical frameworks and methods for investigating the linkages between environmental instability and disease dynamics. To quantitatively support new theoretical frameworks in disease biogeography, Escobar studies a series of multi-parasite, multi-host diseases systems including bat-borne, rodent-borne, vector-borne, and water-borne diseases. More explicitly, he assesses how diseases respond to climate and landscape change. Due to the unique niche that the Escobar lab fills in biogeography, in many studies he often collaborates with multidisciplinary teams to develop novel computational tools that account for the complexities of host-pathogen disease systems and multi-scale analyses. The Escobar lab focal themes, which in turn are the main lines of research and teaching include [1] Diseases Biogeography, [2] Global Change and Infectious Diseases, and [3] Ecoinformatics.