News:

Our work on estimating the basic reproductive number, R0, of SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks in the US and eight European countries won the Lewis Wolpert prize. [News article from LANL]

SARS-CoV-2 within-host dynamics:

• Our work on quantifying the heterogeneity of SARS-CoV-2 infection dynamics and infectiousness is online at Nature Microbiology:
  . Daily sampling of early SARS-CoV-2 infection reveals substantial heterogeneity in infectiousness.
• Our work on predicting individual infectiousness from SARS-CoV-2 viral load dynamics is online at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
  . In vivo kinetics of SARS-CoV-2 infection and its relationship with a person’s infectiousness.
• Our work on SARS-CoV-2 infection dynamics and infectiousness of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals is online at Open Forum Infectious Diseases:
  . Longitudinal analysis of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections reveal limited infectious virus shedding and restricted tissue distribution.

SARS-CoV-2 epidemiology:

• Our work on the rapid spread of the Omicron variant in China after the sudden exit from the ‘zero-COVID’ policy in Dec. 2022 is out at Nature Communications:
  . Swift and extensive Omicron outbreak in China after sudden exit from ‘zero-COVID’ policy
  We estimated around 1 billion people get infected during a short period of time at the end of Dec. 2022 due to the high transmissibility of Omicron and the lack of intervention efforts. This work also provides a direct estimate of the exceptionally high rate of Omicron spread (doubling time: 1.6 days) in a naive and densely populated population.
• Our work on quantifying the strength of selection for new SARS-CoV-2 variants is out at Nature Communications:
  . Estimating the strength of selection for new SARS-CoV-2 variants.
• Our work on the early spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, China, during late 2019 and early 2020 is out at Emerging Infectious Diseases:
  . High Contagiousness and Rapid Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2
  This work is one of the first to point out that SARS-CoV-2 spreads extremely rapidly, and without intervention, it can infect millions in a couple of months’ time (in stark contrast to the predictions of several initial high-profile studies on the Wuhan outbreak [e.g. link, link]). We predicted the potential of the virus to cause global pandemic, and suggested strong social distancing measures are needed to stop transmission. These predictions turns out to be very accurate. The work was initially online as a preprint on Feb. 7, 2020 as:
  . The Novel Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is Highly Contagious and More Infectious Than Initially Estimated

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Our research focuses on developing novel quantitative theories and machine learning tools to understand the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of viruses, and the immune responses across multiple scales of biological organization, i.e. at population, host and sometimes cellular and intracellular scales. Please see ‘Research’ and ‘Publications’ for details about our research.

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