Welcome to the Sauer Lab!
Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, & Natural Resources
Rutgers University

​Our research focuses on wildlife disease ecology and ecoimmunology. We are especially interested in understanding how host behavior and physiology influence disease susceptibility and transmission in the context of environmental change.

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Northern leopard frog metamorphs

Interested in joining the lab? Visit the Join us! page.

Understanding how variation shapes wildlife disease
​Infectious disease outcomes vary widely among individuals, with important consequences for transmission, epidemic size, and extinction risk. The Sauer Lab investigates how heterogeneity in host behavior, physiology, and environment drives this variation and scales up to shape disease dynamics across populations and species.
Our research focuses on the mechanisms linking individual traits to epidemiological outcomes. We study how behaviors such as thermoregulation, resource use, and parental care interact with physiological processes and environmental conditions to determine susceptibility, pathology, and transmission. A central goal is to identify general, predictive frameworks for how disease risk emerges under environmental change.
We take an integrative approach that combines laboratory experiments, field studies, and large-scale synthesis across systems, with a focus on amphibians and birds. By linking organismal processes to population-level patterns, our work aims to improve predictions of disease dynamics in a rapidly changing world.​