Trainees

Inspiring and developing the next generation of scientists is core to our mission. We do this locally and internationally through invested mentorship, a focus on scientists at all levels, and by creating a dynamic interdisciplinary environment where we all learn from each other.

Victoria (Fehintola) Ajogbasile

Victoria Ajogbasile

Victoria is a postdoctoral scholar working on the genomic epidemiology of malaria. Victoria is from Ogun State, Nigeria. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology, a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology and Genomics, and a PhD in Molecular Biology and Genomics, all from Redeemer’s University, Nigeria.She was a research fellow for 7years at the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious diseases (ACEGID) where she worked on genomic surveillance studies of Malaria, COVID-19, HIV, Lassa Fever and Yellow Fever. Victoria’s core goal is to better understand infectious pathogens in order to eradicate them.

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Adrienne Epstein

Adrienne Epstein

Adrienne is a postdoctoral scholar. She joins us from a Liverpool post doc exploring invasive mosquitos (A stephensi) and malaria transmission in the Horn of Africa. Her PhD work applied spatial methods to malaria surveillance data in order to generate maps of malaria risk in Uganda. Adrienne completed her MS in Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2017.

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Luis Esquivel Gomez

Luis Esquivel Gomez

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.

Marco Hamins-Puertolas

Marco Hamins-Puertolas

Marco is a postdoctoral scholar. His research involves developing mathematical models for viral evolution across different scales. Marco has modeled various systems including infectious disease dynamics, prison recidivism, and honey bee population dynamics.

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Nicholas Hathaway

Nicholas Hathaway

Nick is a postdoctoral scholar interested in developing bioinformatics software for the study of genomics and molecular epidemiology in infectious diseases, especially malaria. He earned an MD/PhD at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School under Jeffrey Bailey, where he studied malaria genomics with a focus on targeted amplicon sequencing. Nick completed an internal medicine residency at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, where he also worked on looking for the genomic patterns associated with drug resistance in ESBL E. coli. Currently, he is working on developing methods for analyzing targeted amplicon panels and creating new panels for malaria. He is also developing strategies to better characterize the complex genomics of the multigene families in Plasmodium falciparum of vars, rifins, and stevors.

Jared Honeycutt

Jared Honeycutt

Jared is a postdoctoral scholar studying serological responses during the development of naturally acquired immunity to malaria. He worked in Denise Monack’s lab at Stanford for his PhD studying the pathogenesis of invasive non-typhoidal Salmonella. Jared is interested in exploring the interactions between host immune responses and pathogen genetics with a view toward improving public health interventions such as vaccines.

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William Louie

William Louis PhD portrait photo

William is a postdoctoral scholar interested in the complex transmission dynamics of vector-borne diseases. He earned his PhD in microbiology with an emphasis in the biology of vector-borne diseases at UC Davis under Lark Coffey. There, he studied the impacts of the environment-acquired microbiota within Aedes aegypti mosquitoes on their vector competence for Zika virus. After graduating, he continued in her lab, investigating the ability of Ae. aegyptito become infected by Mayaro virus when fed on viremic rhesus macaques. In addition to research, he advocates for engages with discourse into the colonial history and ethics of tropical medicine.

Max McClure

Max McClure headshot

Max is an infectious disease fellow. He is interested in the ecoepidemiology of vector-borne disease and will be conducting research on entomological risk factors for malaria transmission. Max attended medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, completed Internal Medicine residency at Stanford University, and joined the UCSF Infectious Diseases fellowship in 2022.

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Maxwell Murphy

MaxMurphy

Max is a PhD student in Biostatistics at UC Berkeley. He is interested in using statistical modeling and machine learning to understand malaria transmission dynamics, as well as applications of non parametric statistics to problems of causal inference. In his previous life, he worked as a molecular biologist gaining wet lab experience.

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Ben Singer  

Ben Singer

Ben Singer is a postdoctoral scholar with both Berkeley's Division of Infectious Diseases and Immunity and the EPPIcenter. Before transitioning to his current program, he worked with Nathan Lo at Stanford exploring geographical targeting of mass drug administration for schistosomiasis. Ben’s research began with an internship at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, where he applied quantitative skills he had learnt studying physics at the University of Oxford to the study of nematode locomotion. He earned a DPhil in mathematical methods for evaluating pandemic risk and control at the Bioscience Doctoral Training Programme at Oxford, and interned with the UK's Department for International Development, developing models of international COVID-19 vaccine distribution. 

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 Paula Weidemüller

Paula Weidemuller

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.

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