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 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, 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 mathematical/quantitative theories and tools to understand the spread of viruses, treatment of viral infections and viral evolutionary dynamics across multiple scales of biological organization, i.e. at intracellular, cellular and population scales. Please see ‘Research’ and ‘Publications’ for details about our research.