Committee Members
Oliver Pybus
Chair, Pango Committee
Member, Lineage Designation Committee
Oliver Pybus is Professor of Evolution & Infectious Disease at the University of Oxford and Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Royal Veterinary College London. He is co-Director of the Oxford Martin School Program for Pandemic Genomics and Chief Editor of Virus Evolution. He researches the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of infectious diseases, particularly rapidly-evolving RNA viruses.
Áine O’Toole
Chair, Lineage Designation Committee
Member, Pango Committee
Áine O’Toole is a post-doctoral researcher in the Rambaut Group at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to the pandemic, her research focused on developing bioinformatics tools for viral outbreak surveillance. Áine has contributed to the maintenance of the Pango lineage system and development of tools such as pangolin and civet to help track SARS-CoV-2 lineages in the UK and around the world.
Andrew Rambaut
Deputy Chair, Pango Committee
Member, Lineage Designation Committee
Andrew Rambaut is Professor of Molecular Evolution at the University of Edinburgh researching the evolution, genomic epidemiology and phylogenetics of viral pathogens of human and non-human animals.
Chris Ruis
Deputy Chair, Lineage Designation Committee
Chris Ruis is a postdoctoral researcher in the departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on combining pathogen sequences with other data to understand transmission dynamics.
Rachel Colquhoun
Member, Lineage Designation Committee
, Pango Committee
Dr Rachel Colquhoun is a Postdoc at the University of Edinburgh Institute of Evolutionary Biology, currently building and maintaining the SARS-CoV-2 alignment, variant calling and phylogenetics pipelines. She completed an MMath in Mathematics and a DPhil in Computational Biology at the University of Oxford. Prior to the pandemic, her research focused on developing bioinformatics tools for metagenomic and viral nanopore sequence data and analysis of bacterial genomic variation using pangenome reference graphs.
Angie Hinrichs
Member, Lineage Designation Committee
Angie Hinrichs has been working on the UCSC Genome Browser since 2002, a fun combination of building web-based data visualization and querying tools, data wrangling, and helping to answer questions from researchers worldwide. Since March 2020 she has been working on SARS-CoV-2 variation and phylogenetics data and tools with Professor Russ Corbett-Detig, Yatish Turakhia, and collaborators.
Louis du Plessis
Member, Pango Committee
Louis du Plessis is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford and an research fellow of the Oxford Martin School Programme on Pandemic Genomics. His research focuses on using phylodynamic methods to infer key epidemiological parameters during infectious disease outbreaks and using such inferences to guide and inform public health policy.
Tommy Lam
Member, Pango Committee
Tommy Lam is an Assistant Professor at the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases, School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong. He researches the ecology, evolution and epidemiology of infectious diseases.
Christine Carrington
Member, Pango Committee
Christine Carrington is Professor of Molecular Genetics and Virology at The University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. Her research focuses on evolutionary and ecological factors underlying viral emergence and epidemic behaviour, especially vector-borne RNA viruses.
Erik Alm
Member, Pango Committee
Erik Alm is a Principal Expert in Applied Molecular Epidemiology at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). His research group is an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, computational biologists, molecular biologists, and microbial ecologists.
Eddie Holmes
Member, Pango Committee
Eddie Holmes (University of Sydney, Australia) is an evolutionary biologist who specialises in using genomic tools to understand the emergence, evolution and ecology of viruses. His work gives particular emphasis to revealing the genetic and epidemiological processes that underpin viral emergence, the evolution of major human and animal pathogens, and understanding the nature of global virus diversity.
Martha Nelson
Member, Pango Committee
Martha Nelson is a senior biologist in the Division of Intramural Research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. Her research uses genomic data to understand the evolution and emergence of zoonotic viruses.
Houriiyah Tegally
Member, Lineage Designation Committee
Houriiyah is a PhD Student in Virology & Bioinformatics focusing on the genomic epidemiology and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in South Africa and Africa. During the COVID-19 pandemic she optimized the assembly and analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes from multiple African countries for outbreak response, which was pivotal in the identification of the 501Y.V2/B.1.351 variant of concern. Her research interests revolve around the use of next-generation sequencing data for the genotyping and genomic surveillance of infectious diseases, and the development of bioinformatics tools for effective data analysis.
Stephen Attwood
Member, Lineage Designation Committee
Stephen Attwood is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford and a bioinformatician with Public Health Wales, with an interest in applications of population genetics and phylogenetics to studies of disease.
Verity Hill
Member, Lineage Designation Committee
Verity Hill is a PhD student in the Rambaut group at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh with research interests in molecular evolution, phylogenetics and epidemiology.
Anderson Brito
Member, Lineage Designation Committee
Anderson holds a BSc in Biological Sciences from University of Brasília – UnB, Brazil (2010), a MSc degree in Microbiology from University of São Paulo – USP, Brazil (2013), and a PhD in Computational Biology from Imperial College London (2018). He is working currently as a Postdoctoral associate at Yale School of Public Health (Grubaugh Lab), where he investigates the emergence, transmission, and evolution of viruses (Genomic epidemiology). His research is mainly focused on: Bioinformatics; Virology; Phylogenetics; Genomics; and Epidemiology.
Emily Scher
Member, Lineage Designation Committee
Emily Scher is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh working as part of the Rambaut group with research interests in phylogenetics, machine learning and software development in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Emma B. Hodcroft
Observer, Pango Committee
Emma B. Hodcroft, PhD, is a senior post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern. Dr Hodcroft’s background is in molecular epidemiology, phylogenetics, and evolution, and she has worked on HIV, tuberculosis, Enterovirus, and SARS-CoV-2. She is a strong advocate for open data and open science.
Sebastian Maurer-Stroh
Observer, Pango Committee
Sebastian Maurer-Stroh is an Executive Director at the Bioinformatics Institute of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore. His research interests include computational protein sequence and structure analysis to predict molecular and cellular functions, and discovering molecular mechanisms of biological and clinical phenotypes. He sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of GISAID.