UGI Seminar 'Disease control in the age of genomics'

Venue:  Gertrude Falk Room, Medical Sciences Building

Title: Disease control in the age of genomics

Abstract: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic revolutionised genomics for public health, spurring the rapid development of novel approaches and global sequencing capacity. It also provided an uncontroversial use-case for the benefit of genomics in disease control. Now, we must use this political and technical impetus and pivot to endemic viruses of concern to better understand and control their transmission and spread.

At a basic level, viral genomes provide additional data points so that we can better track how viruses spread beyond traditional epidemiological approaches. Lineage systems are core to this, and aid with coherent communication of the threat of new outbreaks. Further, we can use approaches from the field of phylodynamics, in which we systematically integrate genomic and non-genomic data to combine the fields of epidemiology and evolution, to explore unobserved transmission to understand how viruses spread in space and time. I will use examples of mosquito-borne viruses, such as dengue virus, to illustrate how we can use virus genomes to better control and understand virus evolution and transmission.

Bio:  Verity is a postdoctoral research associate in the Evolutionary and Computational Virology lab at KU Leuven. Her interests lie in the application and development of complex phylodynamics for the control of viruses of public health concern, especially those which have been historically understudied and arthropod-borne viruses.

She has recently completed a three-year postdoctoral position in the Grubaugh lab at the Yale School of Public Health, and holds a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Edinburgh, a Masters of Science in the Control of Infectious Diseases from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and an undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences from Oxford University. She will soon be moving to the Centre for Virus Research at Glasgow University to take up a Wellcome Early Career award.