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Director of the UCL Genetics Institute
University College London
I studied at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and obtained a Masters and PhD from the same institution in 1996, and 2000, respectively. I then spent two years in Edinburgh as a postdoc. In 2002, I was offered an Assistant Professorship in the Department of Genetics in Cambridge where I stayed for five years. I moved to the newly formed MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling within the Department of Infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London in 2007. I joined the UCL Genetics Institute (UGI) as a professor of Computational Systems Biology in 2012 and became Director of the Institute in 2015.
My core interest is how to leverage genomic data to reconstruct the past population history of a variety of organisms. I work on the reconstruction of infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics of human and wildlife pathogens. I also aim to characterise the factors that allow some pathogen lineages to be more successful than others. Most of my work over the last two years has been dedicated to SARS-CoV-2.
My work spans a large spectrum ranging from the fundamental (e.g. reconstructing historical plague pandemics) to the applied (e.g. tracking nosocomial infections in a hospital ward). Indeed, I do not feel there must be a divide between fundamental and applied science, and while my research is driven by scientific curiosity, I hope it will inform better interventions in medicine, public health and conservation biology.
I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
Thursday, October 20, 2022
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM US ET
Thursday, October 20, 2022
11:20 AM – 11:45 AM US ET