September 29, 2021
OEB alumni Trevor Bedford (PhD '08) named a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and awarded a 'genius grant.' Bedford will use the funds to build tools for tracking and forecasting the spread of viral pathogens such as those that cause influenza, Ebola, and COVID.
Bedford was a graduate student in Professor Dan Hartl's lab and is currently a computational virologist and professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. While in the Hartl lab Trevor studied theoretical population genetics. Bedford cleverly applied these principles to the study of influenza and more recently SARS-Cov-2.