Vanessa Ezenwa

Vanessa Ezenwa is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University. She received a BA in biology from Rice University and a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University. Ezenwa completed postdocs at Princeton and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Before joining the Yale faculty in 2021, she was a professor of ecology and infectious diseases at the University of Georgia. Ezenwa’s research focuses on the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases in wild animal populations, and she studies how within-host interactions between hosts and pathogens translate to larger-scale epidemiological patterns.

Ezenwa has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Zoetis award for veterinary research excellence, and a Fulbright Scholar award. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Ezenwa mentors undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers and served as founding director of the Interdisciplinary Disease Ecology Across Scales (IDEAS) PhD training program at the University of Georgia from 2015 to 2021.