GELIFES Seminars - Simon Dellicour

Link to seminar

Simon Dellicour (VU Brussels, Belgium)

Molecular epidemiological approaches to investigate the dispersal dynamic of viruses and the environmental factors impacting it

Recent advances in genomics, mathematical modelling and computational biology have enabled molecular approaches to become key methods to investigate the spread of viral infectious diseases. In the emerging field of molecular epidemiology, genetic analyses of pathogens are used to complement traditional epidemiological methods in various ways. For instance, genetic analyses offer the possibility to infer linkages between infections that are not evident without analysing viral genomes. In particular, the development of phylogeographic methods has enabled to reconstruct dispersal history of epidemics in a discretised or on a continuous space, using only a relatively limited number of viral sequences sampled from known locations and times. At the Spatial Epidemiology Lab (SpELL, ULB), we develop and apply new analytical approaches exploiting such phylogeographic reconstructions to test epidemiological hypotheses about the external and environmental factors impacting the dispersal history and dynamic of viral epidemics.

Biosketch:
Simon Dellicour is a F.R.S.-FNRS Research Associate working at the Spatial Epidemiology Lab of the University of Brussels (ULB, Belgium) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Rega Institute, Evolutionary and Computational Virology lab). Simon has broad interests in molecular epidemiology, as well as population, landscape, and conservation genetics. His main research projects focus on methodological developments and applications in landscape phylogeography, a field at the interface between spatial and molecular epidemiology and that aims to relate phylogenetic informed movements to external/environmental factors. Specifically, his team focuses on the application and development of new methods to investigate the impact of environmental factors on the dispersal history and dynamic of viral lineages, or to assess potential intervention strategies in the context of viral epidemics.