Oliver Pybus

Ancestry and diversification are processes unique to biology that shape every aspect of living systems, from individual cells to whole ecosystems. Using genome sequencing and other technologies we can now investigate these processes in unprecedented detail, and use the insights gained to tackle global challenges such as biodiversity loss, food production, and emerging epidemics. I feel fortunate to be a biologist at such an exciting time in the subject's history.

Most of my research concerns the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of infectious disease. Many pathogens evolve so rapidly that their ecology and evolution are coupled, requiring new inter-disciplinary methods of inquiry. Understanding this joint behaviour, sometimes called phylodynamics, is fundamental to applied problems including outbreak surveillance, vaccine design, and the evolution of drug resistance. I contribute to the theoretical development of phylodynamics and its application to public health and other fields. I develop new computational methods for the evolutionary analysis of genetic sequence data. More generally I am interested in topics at the interface of ecology and evolution, including molecular ecology, ancient DNA, portable genomics, spatial ecology, and statistical genetics.