Katia Koelle

Talk Title: SARS-CoV-2 phylodynamics, with and without phylogenies

Katia Koelle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at Emory University. She earned her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Michigan under the mentorship of Mercedes Pascual and completed her post-doctoral research at Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics with Bryan Grenfell.

She has been on the faculty at Duke University and, since 2017, at Emory University. Her research focuses on the development of mathematical models to better understand patterns of viral evolution and disease dynamics between and within human hosts. She is further interested in the development and application of statistical approaches to characterize disease spread from viral sequence data. She works primarily on the ‘phylodynamics’ of RNA viruses, most notably influenza, dengue, norovirus, and most recently SARS-CoV-2.