Jan - Gytis Dudas & James Hadfield

Speaker: Gytis Dudas & James Hadfield

Hello VanBUG followers, happy new year!

We don’t usually have an event in January, but this year Jennifer Gardy worked with us to organize a special event with two featured speakers.

Event Details

**Date: Jan 11th

Time: 6pm

Location: BCCRC First Floor Lecture Theatre 675 West 10th Avenue, Vancouver BC**

Hope to see you there! Speaker details below:

Speaker: Gytis Dudas

Title: Virus genomes reveal factors that spread and sustained the West African Ebola virus epidemic

Abstract: The 2013–2016 West African epidemic caused by the Ebola virus was of unprecedented magnitude, duration and impact.

Thanks to new technologies complete Ebola virus genomes were sequenced from over 5% of the known cases by various teams operating in the region.

The sheer amount of sequence data have enabled a large international team to reconstruct the entire epidemic from the virus’ perspective, and to reveal the factors that helped sustain Ebola virus transmission across the region.

Future infectious disease outbreaks are likely to generate similar kinds of data, and hopefully follow the blueprint set by our study.

Bio: Gytis Dudas is a Lithuanian researcher based at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle currently working with Trevor Bedford.

Gytis trained as an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, where he stayed to do a PhD on the evolution of diverse RNA viruses with Andrew Rambaut.

Gytis’ research focuses on understanding transmission patterns of rapidly evolving RNA pathogens, by studying viral populations through the lens of population genetics, and identifying evolutionary, ecological and physical barriers that these viruses experience.

Speaker: James Hadfield

Title: Communicating genomic epidemiology in real-time

Abstract: The role of genomics in epidemiology is expanding, with recent retrospective analyses of the ebola and zika epidemics providing relevant insights for public health and epidemic control. Nextstrain and ARTIC are efforts to uncover and disseminate these results in real-time. This involves rapid field-deployable sequencing, the open sharing of genomic data, efficient bioinformatic pipelines and innovative ways to display the results.

This talk will focus on the interactive visualization of genomic data for ongoing epidemics and the role this can play in communicating information to scientists & public health officials.

Bio: James Hadfield completed a BSc (hons) in Mathematics in his home country of New Zealand and a PhD in computational biology from Cambridge University before moving to Trevor Bedford’s lab at the Fred Hutch in Seattle. He works on developing analyses and interactive visualizations for nextstrain.org and ARTIC.