nextstrain: Trevor Bedford and Richard Neher win Phase I of Open Science Prize

Trevor Bedford and Richard Neher are one of the six winning teams in the first-ever Open Science Prize. 

The Open Science Prize is a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Trevor and Richard developed nextstrain,  a real-time tracking tool for emerging epidemics such as ebola and zika. They will use the Phase I $80,000 prize money to further develop their prototype and submit their work for the final Phase II of the competition. One Phase II winner will receive a prize of $230,000.

Congratulations Trevor and Richard!

Click here for the Fred Hutch news release.

 

Leora Feldstein wins travel award to attend 2016 CSTE annual conference in Alaska

CIDID Graduate Student Leora Feldstein  received a Fred Hutch Student/Postdoc Advisory Committee (SPAC) Travel Award to attend the 2016 annual Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists’ (CSTE) Conference in June in Anchorage, Alaska. She will present a poster on the epidemiologic investigation of the first reported outbreak of chikungunya in the U.S. Virgin Islands, 2014-2015.

Well done, Leora!

Jason Xu awarded NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

CIDID Graduate Student Jason Xu has been awarded a Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Jason is currently at the University of Washington, mentored by Vladimir Minin.

Jason's research proposal is titled "Statistical Analysis of Partially Observed Interacting Particle Systems".  He will conduct his postdoctoral research with Dr. Kenneth Lange at UCLA. 

Congratulations, Jason!!

Chikungunya research featured in MedPage Today

Leora Feldstein presented a poster at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene meeting for her research studies on Chikungunya in the US Virgin Islands.  Leora’s work and comments are featured in this MedPage Today article. Leora is an Epidemiology PhD student at the University of Washington, mentored by CIDID Director Betz Halloran. 

Nextflu featured in GenomeWeb article

Nextflu, developed by Trevor Bedford (CIDID/Fred Hutch) and Richard Neher (Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology), is featured in this GenomeWeb article detailing future developments and the recently-released versions for tracking the evolution of the Ebola virus and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

CIDID Postdoc Amanda Koepke wins ASA 2015 Young Investigator Award

Amanda Koepke won one of the 2015 Young Investigator Awards from the Statistics in 
Epidemiology Section of the American Statistical Association, for her paper "Predictive modeling of cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh,” co-authored with Ira Longini, Betz Halloran, Jon Wakefield, and Vladimir Minin.  Congratulations, Amanda!

Click here for link to the ASA Statistics in Epidemiology Section's announcement about these awards.