Sophie Belman

I am a Schmidt Science Fellow (https://schmidtsciencefellows.org/fellows/) and a Postdoctoral Scientist in the Global Health Resilience group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (https://www.bsc.es/discover-bsc/organisation/research-departments/global-health-resilience) in Barcelona Spain. My current research focus is towards understanding the impact of our dynamic global climate in bacterial respiratory disease. I am working towards elucidating climatic and socioeconomic drivers of pneumococcal disease by integrating earth systems information with infectious disease epidemiological and genomic data in Bayesian hierarchical frameworks. I completed my PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where she utilized thousands of Streptococcus pneumoniae genomes together with human mobility and other data types to quantify the extent and mechanisms of pneumococcal spread. Without the context of climate these models are not robust to our dynamic environment. I am additionally working on E4Warning a project towards improving dengue forecasting in Vietnam incorporating human mobility data. I acquired an MSc in Medical Microbiology and a BA in Biology with a minor in neuroscience. I was previously a research associate focused on genetic epidemiology for projects in both the Huntsman Cancer Institute and the University of Utah Department of Dermatology. My MSc dissertation was a bioinformatic analysis of tuberculosis genomic epidemiology and drug resistance. In addition to science I am an avid rock climber, runner, skier, and biker. Ultimately, I strive to utilise advances in genomics research to bridge the health disparity gap globally and improve health worldwide.