Speakers

Nídia Trovão

Research Scientist
Fogarty International Center

Topic: Global phylogeography

Dr.Trovão is currently a research scientist at the Fogarty International Center, and lead the group on Genomic Epidemiology and Evolution of Pathogens (GEEP). At GEEP, she studies the mechanisms that drive the evolution and spread of pathogens in human and animal populations. Dr.Trovão is also part of the Multinational Influenza Seasonal Mortality Study, a network that aims to build analytical capacity in genomic epidemiology research through training workshops and hosting visiting researchers, establishing long-term collaborations with scientist globally. Besides viral respiratory viruses, she also performs phylodynamic modeling of other emergent pathogens, such as norovirus, HIV, and cholera.

Maciej F. Boni

Professor
College of Science and Technology
Temple University

Lab website: Boni Lab

Topic: Environmental drivers

Dr. Boni’s research focuses on drug-resistance management in malaria and human influenza epidemiology, seroepidemiology, and evolution. He also works actively in recombination detection and reconstructing recombination histories and in several other areas of evolutionary and social epidemiology. Please see https://mol.ax/pub for our publications and type ‘subtopic’ in the text box to focus on a particular area. Most critically, he is part of several consortia and international collaborations developing the preparations and responses to artemisinin-resistance in Africa — an urgent global health problem that affects hundreds of millions of people. Details of drug resistance to the artemisinins were made public in Aug 2020 (Rwanda) and Nov 2021 (Uganda), and this most recent article (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211803) shows that it is getting worse.

Henry Wan

Professor
School of Medicine
University of Missouri

Lab website: SystemsBio Lab

Topic: Species barrier in influenza

Dr. Wan’s long-term career goals are to understand how zoonotic pathogens (especially influenza A viruses) emerge and re-emerge at the animal-human interface and to improve the effectiveness of the influenza vaccines in disease prevention and control by developing and applying systems biology based translational approaches. Translational systems biology is an integrated, multi-scale, evidence-based approach that combines laboratory, clinical and computational methods with an explicit goal of developing effective means of control of biological processes for improving human health and rapid clinical application.

Hui-Ling Yen

Associate Professor
Division of Public Health Laboratory Sciences
The University of Hong Kong

Topic: HPAI

Dr. Hui-Ling Yen received her Ph.D. in Epidemiological Science from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor followed by her postdoctoral training at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, TN. Her research interests focus on understanding the mechanisms of influenza transmission among and between different reservoirs, investigating potential virus-host interactions that affect viral pathogenicity and transmission, and examining the molecular determinants that confer antiviral resistance. A major research focus in her lab has been on transmission mechanisms. The ongoing research projects apply interdisciplinary research tools to study the modes of transmission for influenza and other respiratory viruses under laboratory settings and in the field, including at the animal-human interfaces. Her lab also uses genetic analyses, molecular biology, and phenotypic measurements to study critical molecular determinants and their effect on protein functionality and viral fitness. Professor Yen is a full member of the American Society of Virology and a committee member of ISIRV Antiviral Group. She serves at the Editorial Boards of Antiviral Research and Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses.

Benjamin Cowling

Professor
Division Head, Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
The University of Hong Kong

Topic: Control/management

Dr. Cowling joined the School of Public Health (SPH) at HKU in 2004. Prior to moving to Hong Kong, he graduated with a PhD in medical statistics at the University of Warwick (UK) in 2003, and spent a year as a postdoc at Imperial College London (UK). Professor Cowling has been the Head of the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics since 2013. He is responsible for teaching the introductory module in epidemiology on the MPH curriculum, and is the chairman of the Departmental Research Postgraduate Committee. Professor Cowling is a co-director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control at HKU SPH. Professor Cowling’s primary research focus is in infectious disease epidemiology. In recent years he has designed and implemented large field studies of influenza transmission in the community and the effectiveness and impact of control measures. His latest research has focused on the modes of respiratory virus transmission, influenza vaccination effectiveness, and immunity to infections at the individual and population level. He has strong links with China CDC, and the NIGMS-funded Harvard Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. Professor Cowling is a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and a Fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, and an Associate Editor of Emerging Infectious Diseases. He has more than 500 publications listed in Scopus, including 66 articles with 66 or more citations (H-index of 66). Professor Cowling has received numerous awards including HKU Outstanding Young Researcher Award (2011), Croucher Senior Research Fellowship (2015), HKU Outstanding Researcher Award (2017), and RGC Senior Research Fellowship (2020). He was awarded an MBE in Queen Elizabeth II’s 2021 birthday honours.

Jonathan Runstadler

Professor
Chair, Infectious Disease and Global Health Department
Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine
Tufts University

Lab website: The Runstadler Lab

Topic: Influenza and wildlife declines

Professor Runstadler joined the Department of Infectious Disease & Global Health in 2017. Working at the host-pathogen-environmental interface, the Runstadler laboratory studies how emerging virus, specifically influenza, is maintained, transmitted and evolves in reservoir or intermediate animal hosts. A major part of this work is directed at understanding how both host and viral factors may influence the risk of viral spillover into new hosts, including humans. Dr. Runstadler is working with collaborators to bridge the gap between studies of disease surveillance and disease ecology with a molecular and comparative understanding of pathogenesis, immune response and evolution. Our current research is particularly focused on understanding genotype-phenotype relationships of the influenza virus, the role of diverse hosts and environments, and the interspecies movement of virus to the emergence of disease in new populations. Prior to joining the faculty at the Cummings School, Dr. Runstadler was a faculty member at both the University of Alaska Fairbanks with the Institute of Arctic Biology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Division of Comparative Medicine. Dr. Runstadler received an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his DVM and PhD in Genetics from the University of California, Davis. Prior to beginning his own lab at UAF, Dr. Runstadler was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Companion Animal Health under Dr. Neils Pedersen at the University of California, Davis.

Matthew Biggerstaff

Epidemiologist
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Matthew Biggerstaff, ScD, MPH, serves as team lead of the Applied Research and Modeling Team in CDC Influenza Division’s Epidemiology and Prevention Branch (EPB). Dr. Biggerstaff joined the team during its creation in 2015 and became team lead in 2022. In this role, he oversees team activities related to the following: characterizing flu season severity, disease burden, and influenza virus transmission in the population; integrating advanced analytics and mathematical modeling into flu-related public health response efforts; and improving the use and accuracy of influenza forecasting to better predict and mitigate the impact of flu on the U.S. population. Dr. Biggerstaff started his career at CDC as an ORISE fellow in the Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch in 2006 and joined the Influenza Division’s Surveillance and Outbreak Response Team as an Epidemiologist in 2009.

Topic: Predictive models, including strain evolution, forecasting

Michelle Wille

Senior Research Fellow
University of Melbourne

Topic: Ecology of flu in wild avian hosts

Dr Michelle Wille’s primary research focus is the dynamics of wild bird viruses: the ecology and evolution of influenza A viruses in waterfowl, shorebirds and seabirds, which utilize a range of migratory strategies to disseminate viruses. She is currently working on the dynamics of avian influenza in in Australia and Antarctica through detection, isolation and characterization of viruses, but also using serology. Beyond influenza A, she is starting to assess viromes in wild birds, with a particular interest in ecological drivers of observed patterns. Current projects are being undertaken in collaboration with Aeron Hurt at WHO Collaborating Centre for Influenza, Marcel Klaassen at Deakin University and Edward Holmes at University of Sydney.

Martha Nelson

Adjunct Professor
Georgetown University

Evolutionary Biologist
US National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Topic: Swine flu

Dr Nelson is a computational biologist who studies pathogen evolution. She uses large-scale genetic data to study rapidly evolving RNA viruses at the human-animal interface, including coronavirus and influenza. She has worked as a scientist at the National Institutes of Health since 2008, where she discovered the zoonotic origins of the virus that caused the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and collaborates with scientists on seven continents to mitigate future pandemic threats. She received her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics in 2008.