PreMiEr Spring 2025 Seminar Series- Dr. Colin Worby, Broad Institute

The NSF Engineering Research Center for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr) invites you to another installment of the PreMiEr Spring 2025 Seminar Series on April 10th from Noon to 1pm on Zoom:

Dr. Colin Worby, Computational Scientist from the Broad Institute:  Challenges and opportunities in bacterial genomic epidemiology

Infectious disease dynamics can be better understood using pathogen genomic epidemiology, allowing insights into transmission routes and pathogen reservoirs. This field has risen to prominence in recent years due to falling sequencing costs and improved methodology, as well as the urgent need for epidemiological insights during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, bacterial studies are considerably underrepresented in the field relative to viral studies, due in part to greater sequencing costs, genome complexity, and common asymptomatic, long-term carriage. In this talk, Dr. Worby will discuss many of the challenges associated with inferring transmission dynamics from bacterial sequence data, and outline strategies to tackle some particularly challenging scenarios, including within-host pathogen diversity, long-term endemic circulation and plasmid-mediated dissemination of drug-resistance. Dr. Worby will also highlight new efforts to characterize bacterial strain sharing using complex samples, including strain mixes and metagenomes.

This series is open to the public, but non-PreMiEr members must register to receive the Zoom link. You need register only once for the entire series.

https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eYbQe8UIyZcOXHg