I joined the lab in October of 2019 as a Postdoc to work on several aspects of the evolution and transmission of infectious diseases. I am currently in the lab as a Swiss National Science Foundation Early Postdoc Mobility fellow. As such, I am studying how reassortment influences the fitness of seasonal human influenza viruses, based on reassortment networks reconstructed from genetic sequences data of different segments from seasonal human influenza viruses. Additionally, I am looking into recombination patterns of viruses and how to model them.
Before joining the lab, I was doing a PhD with Prof. Tanja Stadler at ETH Zürich in Switzerland from April 2016 to September 2019. During that time, I was working on theoretical aspects of models that allow us to efficiently infer how lineages coalesce within and migrate between different sub-populations. Additionally, I was developing tools that allow to connect rates of coalescence and migration to be connected to predictor data, or to infer the shared history of species in the presence of gene flow. Later during my PhD, I was developing a Markov chain Monte Carlo framework to infer reassortment networks from genetic sequence data of segmented viruses. Additionally, I was working on studying the local spread of Influenza as part of the Influenza in Basel Study.
A lot of my research that includes developing novel methods end up as BEAST2 packages. These include CoalRe, CoupledMCMC, MASCOT, and AIM in StarBeast2. Additionally, I was involved in organizing and teaching at several Taming the Beast workshops.