Dr. Lisa Belden

FACULTY AFFILIATE   |   Global Change Center

Biological Sciences

Lab Website  •  Google Scholar  •  Dept Page

belden@vt.edu  •   (540) 231-2505

Dr. Belden is a community ecologist working primarily in the field of disease ecology. Many projects in the Belden lab have direct ties to the IGC program, such as work examining the role of symbiotic skin microbes in preventing amphibian infection by the chytrid fungus that has caused many amphibian population declines around the world.  Most of the current projects in the Belden Lab focus on the theme of understanding how host-associated microbes impact disease dynamics across a variety of systems.

Dr. Belden is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. She serves on the advisory board of SEEDS, a non-profit environmental education organization located in Blacksburg, Virginia. She has published more than 90 peer-reviewed papers.

At Virginia Tech, Dr. Belden teaches an undergraduate general education course, Plants and Civilization, and an upper-level undergraduate course, Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Senior Seminar. She also occasionally teaches a graduate seminar on maintaining work/life balance in academia, and contributes to a team-taught graduate course on microbiome data analysis.