Ary Hoffmann is a biologist undertaking research on bacterial symbionts of disease vectors, pest control, and climate change adaptation. His group is exploring novel approaches for suppressing disease transmission in mosquito vectors and in decreasing agricultural pest damage. Hoffmann has worked collaboratively with mosquito programs around the world and with local pest control agencies. His microbe work has focussed particularly on using Wolbachia and Regiella endosymbionts to suppress dengue and plant virus transmission.  He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science a foreign fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, and a Companion of the Order of Australia. He heads a research team located at the Bio21 Institute of the University of Melbourne where he is a Laureate Professor and he is also a Distinguished Professor at Aalborg University.

Judith Berman is a Professor at Tel Aviv University since 2012 and Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota. She studies how pathogenic yeasts respond to their environments, primarily using Candida albicans and Candida glabrata. Her work strives to understand drug response mechanisms caused by genetic mutations, genomic copy number changes, as well as  physiological processes that affect genetically identical cells differently. Her lab takes an interdisciplinary approach using genetics, genomics, and cell biology, combined with chemistry, bioinformatics, and computational biology. She has studied fundamental aspects of morphogenesis, chromosome stability, chromosome components from centromeres to telomeres and origins of replication, chromatin-mediated silencing, gene essentiality, as well as drug resistance. Her recent work addresses drug tolerance, the ability of some cells to grow, albeit slowly, in the presence of a drug that inhibits other cells in the same population. Her group is asking about the isolate-to-isolate and cell-to-cell differences in drug responses. Prof. Berman is an EMBO Member, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology.

Evolution, adaptation, and spread: lessons learned about viruses from their genetic sequences

When respiratory viruses such as influenza and SARS-CoV-2 replicate, they often make errors that go uncorrected. While a small fraction of these errors or mutations end up being advantageous to these viruses, most are either harmful to the viruses or do not substantially impact the ability of these viruses to transmit and spread. In this lecture, I will summarize how obtaining viral samples from infected individuals and sequencing these samples can help us understand how these viruses change over time, how they adapt while circulating in the human population, and how they spread globally over the years. To this end, I will integrate current understanding of how respiratory virus populations change within and between infected individuals as well as within communities and globally. I will also detail how viral sequences can help us understand what public health interventions are likely to be successful and which ones are more likely to fail.

Short bio: Dr. Katia Koelle is Professor of Biology at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, USA. She earned her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Michigan and continued her training as a post-doctoral researcher at the Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. Her research focuses on the development and application of evolutionary analyses to improve understanding of virus adaptation and disease spread at the within-host, between-host, and population level scales. Her research applications focus primarily on influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, dengue viruses, and noroviruses.

Mercedes Pascual is a Professor in the Departments of Biology and Environmental Studies at New York University, and an external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. A theoretical and computational ecologist, she is interested in the population dynamics of infectious diseases, their response to changing environments and their interplay with pathogen diversity. Her research has combined process-based mathematical models with statistical inference methods for nonlinear and noisy systems, to address the impact of climate variability and climate change on the temporal and spatio-temporal patterns of water-borne and vector-borne infections. Her work has also addressed the interplay of transmission dynamics and pathogen evolution related to immune evasion. She is currently investigating these eco-evolutionary dynamics in hyper-diverse pathogens (of human, plant and microbial hosts) to understand coexistence of large numbers of strains and implications for population resilience. Finally, her work has contributed analyses of the structure of large interaction networks in ecology and epidemiology (describing “who eats whom”, “who infects whom”, “who is protected from whom”), and of the relationship between structure and  stability in the face of environmental perturbations.

Dr. Pascual  received her Ph.D. degree from the joint program of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship for studies at Princeton University, and a Centennial Fellowship in the area of Global and Complex Systems by the James S. McDonnell Foundation for her research at the University of Michigan.  She received the Robert H. MacArthur award from the Ecological Society of America. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sébastien Gagneux is Professor of Infection Biology and Head of Department at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH)/University of Basel. After receiving his PhD from the University of Basel, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, USA. He then started his own laboratory at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London, UK, before joining Swiss TPH in 2010. His research focuses on the ecology and evolution of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with a particular focus on antimicrobial resistance.

Theo Sanderson is an Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His work centers on leveraging large scale genomic datasets to reveal insights into the evolution and functionality of human-infecting viruses. Theo's PhD and early postdoctoral work, at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, focused on functional genomics of the malaria parasite, including some of the first genome-scale screens for malaria. He spent a year as an AI Resident at Google, and subsequently worked in the laboratory of Mike Blackman at the Francis Crick Institute. Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic he has worked on viral genomics, developing and applying new tools to make sense of the unprecedented scale of data now available.