Trevor Bedford (virologist)
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Harvard University (Ph.D.)
Trevor Bedford | |
|---|---|
| Education | University of Chicago (BA) Harvard University (Ph.D.) |
| Known for | First warning of community spread of COVID-19 in the United States |
| Medical career | |
| Profession | Computational virologist |
Trevor Bedford is an American computational virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.[1] His research focuses on tools to speed the process of using genomic sequencing data to map the evolutionary trees of pathogens -- and thus yield insights into geographic spread, epidemic growth rate, and vaccine efficacy.[2] Starting with an early system called Nextflu in 2015, Bedford and Richard Neher co-developed Nextstrain, an open source system for computing viral evolutionary trees from sequencing data.[3] In 2020, Bedford was able to use data from the Flu Tracking Project and Nextstrain to first document community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States.[4]
In 2021, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Bedfords work, naming him a 2021 MacArthur fellow.[5]
