Group starts at Yale School of Public Health
🧬 The Belman research group will use pathogen genomes to understand infectious disease dynamics, including how the environment impacts disease patterns and how existing microbial diversity both modifies and is modified by these effects.
☀️ What do we mean by the environment? The environment includes longer term patterns and short term variability of things like like temperature, humidity, and precipitation. It also includes air pollutants both anthropogenic (vehicle emissions) and natural (dust storms), as well as the human populations and sociodemographic factors which can increase or mitigate these factors.
🧠 🫁 What diseases? To start with, the diseases of focus will be bacterial respiratory diseases which include meningitis or pneumonia for example. Despite lower respiratory tract infections being some of the leading causes of death worldwide we have very little idea how the environment influences evolutionary selection in the microbial population, or can alter patterns of transmission, carriage, to local or invasive diseases.
If any of these topics sound interesting to you, you’re excited about exploring complex questions, using and developing computational models (statistical to machine learning), diving into genomes with bioinformatics, get in touch and we can explore potential projects together. I will be looking to grow a team grounded in curiousity, kindness, and scientific enthusiasm.
Thanks to all supervisors, mentors, and peers past and present. Huge thanks especially to Schmidt Science Fellows for the support over the past several years and advancing science at the intersection between disciplines and also huge thanks to the support of Dean Megan Ranney. Excited to be joining you linking science and society!
🚀 Finally, watch this space! We have a new paper coming out next week!
From Salt Lake to Oregon to Montana to London to Cambridge to Barcelona to New Haven thanks to so many people but shout out to Prof. Stephen Bentley, Henrik Salje, Rachel Lowe, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, ISPPD