ID modeling seminar

Join researchers from Bekeley, the EPPIcenter and Proctor in lively discussions centered around modeling infectious disease. This small group meets monthly, and welcomes serious participants.

Feb 11 Luis Esquivel Gomez and Paula Weidemüller from the EPPIcenter @ UCSF will present

Luis is a postdoctoral scholar. He is using Bayesian phylodynamic models to study reassortment patterns and host-switching events in influenza viruses, with the aim of reconstructing a global reassortment map of influenza A subtypes.  After obtaining a BSc in Biology at the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY) in the south of Mexico, he earned an MSc in Evolutionary Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD with Dr. Denise Kühnert at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. During his PhD, he applied phylodynamic approaches to study evolutionary dynamics of human pathogens like coronaviruses, HIV, Yersinia pestis, and Salmonella enterica. Post- PhD, he worked at the Phylogenomics unit of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Public Health Research at the Robert Koch Institute studying transmission dynamics of pathogens like West Nile virus and Respiratory Syncytial virus.

Paula is a postdoctoral researcher.She is investigating local transmission dynamics of respiratory pathogens using phylodynamic modelling paired with diverse data inputs. She intends to inform public health interventions tailored to the specific, local transmission dynamics. Paula did her Bachelor's at the University of Hamburg, in Molecular Life Sciences. She switched to Systems Biology for her PhD in at Heidelberg University, then completed her PhD with Evangelia Petsalaki at the EMBL-EBI in Cambridge. She studied the context-dependency of cancer vulnerabilities by analyzing large-scale CRISPR-KO screens. This work sparked my enthusiasm for Bayesian statistics combined with building mathematical models for specific research questions while carefully modeling the specific properties of different data modalities.