14.00 to 15.00

Large Seminar Room, 1st Floor, Cambridge Institute of Public Health

Dr Chris Illingworth
Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge

Title: Statistical methods for the study of rapid evolutionary processes

Abstract: While Darwin imagined evolution to involve very slow and gradual change, significant evolutionary processes can occur on timescales of weeks or days.  By repeatedly collecting genome sequence data from an evolving population, these processes can be directly observed, however these new datasets require new statistical approaches for their interpretation.

With a focus on the evolution of influenza virus within a single individual, I describe a statistical framework for the inference of evolutionary parameters from short read sequence data.  I will describe some recent applications to data, considering the predictability of evolution during the emergence of a viral pandemic, apparent differences in evolutionary dynamics between animal and human hosts, and the potential for genome sequence data to inform the clinical treatment of infectious disease.