Michael Milgroom joined the faculty in the Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology section of the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University in 1987. His research interests were in epidemiology, ecology, genetics, evolution, and population genetics of fungal plant pathogens. For most of his academic career, he taught graduate-level and undergraduate-level courses in plant pathology. In 2015, he published a textbook titled Population Biology of Plant Pathogens: Genetics, Ecology, and Evolution, aimed at graduate students in plant pathology, which combined his teaching and research interests. In 2012 his teaching broadened beyond plant pathology to offer courses of interest to general biology students, particularly pre-med and pre-public health students. He teamed up with a colleague to teach “Biology of infectious disease: From molecules to ecosystems”, which inspired this book. He alsoco-taught a course for two years titled, “Infectious disease ecology and evolution.” Milgroom retired from Cornell in January 2020—just as Covid-19 was being reported from Wuhan, China—and began writing this book based on his teaching experience.
