Sonia Alitzer

Sonia M. Altizer (born 1970) is an American ecologist and professor at the University of Georgia Department of Entomology.

Her research includes work on animal migration, infectious disease dynamics, parasite transmission, urbanization, climate change, and butterflies. She grew up in York, Pennsylvania. Her passion for biology and the natural world began when she received a gift of a microscope and a grow-your-own-butterflies kit on her twelfth birthday.

Altizer received a B.S. from Duke University in 1992 and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1998. She also did a postdoctoral work at Princeton University and Cornell University.

Career and research

For 20 years since a graduate student of the University of Minnesota, Altizer traveled the world to study monarch butterfly migration, ecology, and interactions with a protozoan parasite. She has researched how seasonal migration of these butterflies affects parasite transmission, and also developed collaborative databases of mammalian infectious diseases, on host behavior, ecology, and life history interact with global-scale patterns of parasitism. She also focused her research on songbird-pathogen dynamics, including studies of house finch conjunctivitis, West Nile virus, and salmonellosis. Altizer has published several publications and she recently co-edited a book that would be published in 2015, titled Monarchs in a Changing World: Biology and Conservation of an Iconic Insect. She also and participated in high-level task forces dedicated to monarch butterfly conservation. A citizen science project called Monarch Health is run by her students at University of Georgia, which is now the eighth year. There are hundreds of volunteers across North America in sampling wild monarchs for a debilitating disease.

Honors and awards Odum School of Ecology Award for Teaching Excellence (2008) Odum School of Ecology Faculty Instructor of the Year Award (2012) UGA Athletic Association Professor of Ecology (2014) Lothar Tresp Outstanding Honors Professor (2016) Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award (2018) Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (2020) Fellow, Ecological Society of America (2024)

Personal life Altizer rides horses and has two children.

Selected publications