At the beginning of the month I left my primary appointments as Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and as Professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. I’m building a new research studio focused on foundation models for evolution and ecology. I don’t have public details to share yet, but I’m hoping to say more in the coming months. At heart, I’m trying to get closer to the science. Over the years I’ve found myself advising and managing more than working on problems directly, and a small, flat team of peers feels like the way back to it, especially now, as deep learning models begin to reshape how we understand biological sequence data.

These have been a remarkable thirteen years at Fred Hutch, and more recently at HHMI, and I’m leaving deeply grateful. Getting to watch lab members become better versions of themselves over the course of their training has been the most rewarding part of the job. In my time here, I’ve gotten to work with so many kind and brilliant people as collaborators, friends and colleagues. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to contribute as a scientist.

Moving forward, I’ll be External Affiliate Investigator at the Fred Hutch and in this role will be keeping a thread of research going focused on phylodynamics and genomic epidemiology. I’ll stay primary advisor for more senior graduate students Nashwa Ahmed and Philippa Steinberg and will be co-mentor for clinical fellow Amin Bemanian and graduate student Carlos Avendano. Richard Neher and I co-led Nextstrain since the first nextflu prototypes in 2014. JT McCrone has stepped in for me in my previous day-to-day role and will be supervising the Seattle / New Zealand-based development team of James Hadfield, Jover Lee and Victor Lin. I’ll still be involved with Nextstrain as scientific advisor. John Huddleston has been leading the work on influenza strain selection for a while now and will continue to do so, though moving sponsors at the Fred Hutch to work with Jesse Bloom. I’ll be involved as contributor with Richard Neher, Jesse and John on this flu work. Jacob Dodds, Katie Kistler and Cécile Tran Kiem are around through the summer before departing to new positions.

This site will stay the home of “phylodynamic” research output going forwards.