Current Research Interests
I am mainly interested in understanding the relative roles of recombination, mutation and selection in shaping genetic variation in and determining the genetic structure of populations of microorganism, especially those that are etiological agents of infectious diseases. I see this subject as having the virtues of being central to our understanding of the population genetics of microbes and at the same time having practical value for understanding and ideally controlling existing and and emerging infectious diseases. I believe that a combination of experimental studies in the laboratory, mathematical modeling, and retrospective analyses of DNA sequence data will enable us to understand the relative importance of these evolutionary processes in generating and maintaining genetic variation in microbial populations and shaping their genetic structure. With the advent of next generation sequencing technologies the evaluation of the relative contribution of the forces maintaining and generating variation genome wide is an incredible opportunity to understand the genetic bases of pathogenicity and the bases of adaptive evolution in pathogens.
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