The Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Ecology Lab (IDEEL) was officially 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. IDEEL is a virtual laboratory founded at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Brown University and now extending to partners across the globe. Co-founded with the support of the late Steven Meshnick, MD, PhD, the idea was to provide a platform for collaborative interdisciplinary research that explores how pathogens interact with human hosts. Investigators come from a wide-breadth of backgrounds including infectious disease physicians, epidemiologists, molecular parasitologists, cell biologists, geneticists, and geographers.