Highly mutable pathogens such as influenza and HIV pose a serious threat to public health. Better understanding of how these pathogens evolve could inform efforts to treat and prevent infection. In this talk, I’ll discuss the statistical problem of inferring an evolutionary model from data, and how we’ve developed a new method to solve this problem using ideas from statistical physics. I’ll also show an in-depth application to understand how HIV evolves in vivo to escape from human immune responses.

Prof. John Barton