This symposium brings together a wide range of experts to identify data and theoretical gaps that limit the development of ecological theory and its application to conservation medicine. One of the greatest challenges facing earth stewardship is increased pathogen transmission and emergence in plant and animal host communities. To address this problem, attention has turned towards functional traits that may explain the outcome of environment-host-vector-pathogen interactions. Recent studies suggest that functional traits could be used to screen hosts for their potential to function as pathogen reservoirs, enabling a level of prediction previously unachievable. Despite the promise of these studies, little has been done to integrate emerging trait-based models with traditional disease ecology and epidemiological models. Emerging trait-based models emphasize physiological and morphological traits that govern the immediate interface between hosts, vectors, pathogens, and the abiotic environment. This approach, however, has ignored demography. In contrast, traditional disease models have inherent demographic structure (e.g., susceptible, infected, and recovered classes), which influences disease dynamics. Thus, integrating trait-based models and traditional disease models is essential for the development of general disease theory and its application to conservation medicine. This challenge extends beyond disease ecology because it addresses fundamental issues in the development of basic ecological theory. Therefore, the symposium covers topics that will also interest ecologists who do not study disease. We meet this challenge by bringing a wide range of experts together to 1) identify data gaps for relationships between the environment, functional traits, and epidemiological parameters and 2) identify theoretical gaps that prevent the integration of emerging trait-based models with traditional demographic-based disease models. The opening speaker is a longstanding expert in conservation medicine, who will highlight key challenges for disease ecology in the context of earth stewardship. The first group of presentations feature empirical studies from a diversity of systems that demonstrate the potential for functional traits in disease ecology. The second group of presentations highlights theoretical approaches to trait-based theory and their potential to integrate with traditional disease models. The symposium closes with an open discussion of future research directions.