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UGI Seminar: Dr Simon Dellicour, University of Brussels
05 February 2025, 3:00 pm–4:00 pm
Seminar Title: Molecular epidemiological approaches to investigate the dispersal dynamic of viruses and the environmental factors impacting it
Event Information
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Organiser
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Marina Escalera Zamudio
UGI Seminar Speaker Dr Simon Dellicour will be giving a seminar on:
Wednesday, 5 February at 3pm
Medawar Watson Lecture Theatre
Title: "Molecular epidemiological approaches to investigate the dispersal dynamic of viruses and the environmental factors impacting it"
Abstract: Recent advances in genomics, mathematical modelling and computational biology have enabled molecular approaches to become key methods to investigate the spread of viral infectious diseases. In the field of molecular epidemiology, genetic analyses of pathogens are used to complement traditional epidemiological methods in various ways. For instance, genetic analyses offer the possibility to infer linkages between infections that are not evident without analysing viral genomes. In particular, the development of phylogeographic methods has enabled to reconstruct dispersal history of epidemics in a discretised or on a continuous space, using only a relatively limited number of viral sequences sampled from known locations and times. At the Spatial Epidemiology Lab (SpELL; University of Brussels, Belgium), we develop and apply new analytical approaches exploiting such phylogeographic reconstructions to test epidemiological hypotheses about the external and environmental factors impacting the dispersal history and dynamic of viral epidemics.
About the Speaker
Dr Simon Dellicour
at University of Brussels
Simon Dellicour is a bioengineer graduated at the University of Louvain (Belgium) in 2009. He subsequently did a PhD under the supervision of Patrick Mardulyn at the University of Brussels (2009-13), a first post-doc in the team of Oliver Pybus at the University of Oxford (2013-15), a second post-doc in the group of Philippe Lemey at the University of Leuven (Belgium, 2015-18), and then came back to the University of Brussels for a third post-doc in the team of Marius Gilbert (2018-20). In 2020, he became an FNRS Research Associate, a permanent academic position awarded by the Belgian Fonds National pour la Recherche Scientifique. Simon is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Rega Institute, Evolutionary and Computational Virology lab). Simon has broad interests in molecular and spatial epidemiology, animal/plant/virus phylogeography, as well as population, landscape and conservation genetics. His main research projects focus on methodological developments and applications in landscape phylogeography, a field at the interface between spatial and molecular epidemiology and that aims to relate phylogenetic informed movements to external/environmental factors. He is currently heading the Spatial Epidemiology Lab (SpELL; https://spell.ulb.be/) at the University of Brussels.
More about Dr Simon Dellicour