Koelle Lab

Excited to share our recent preprint on quantifying pandemic potential from experimental transmission studies, spearheaded by grad student Elizabeth Somsen in my group and in collab with Troy Sutton & lab at Penn State and Anice Lowen at Emory: biorxiv.org/content/10.110….

Hope to post again in less than a year :)

Collaboration with Lucas Ferreri and the Lowen lab at Emory to look at influenza virus evolution and dispersal during infection within a host: pnas.org/doi/abs/10.107…

Fortunate to collaborate with Rustom Antia and Jim Bull on an analysis focused on the question: Why do respiratory viruses evolve antigenically while viruses undergoing systemic replication do not? watermark.silverchair.com/eoaf002.pdf?to…

A fun analysis with David Rasmussen focused on seeing if incomplete purifying selection impacts/biases our estimates of epidemiological parameters in phylodynamic analyses: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.109… (thankfully, it doesn't bias estimates much at all!)

And while I'm on tweeter (once in a blue moon), here are some relatively recent papers from our group!

Congratulations to Dr. Yeongseon Park for her successful PhD defense on Friday, March 7, 2025!

(We think this new approach is preferable to existing approaches - some of which we've developed - because it uses a different subset of viral sites to estimate transmission bottleneck sizes and is less prone to underestimation of bottleneck sizes.)

We just posted a preprint on a new approach for estimating transmission bottleneck sizes. Spoiler alert: we confirm bottleneck sizes for influenza virus and SARS-CoV-2 to be tiny using the new approach: biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…

Congratulations @park_yeongseon and @m_a_martin 🎉

#eeid2023 Transmission bottleneck and disease severity

And now with a more accurate title! Also a gift link, so it should not be behind a paywall. nytimes.com/2023/05/10/sci…

Our paper on influenza reassortment in mammals is out now on @NatureComms! Congratulations to all our collaborators!rdcu.be/cZtAo @anice_lowen @LucasFerreri1 @KoelleLab @CRP_FLU_UGA @Juaco1802 @Aivlys87 @juergenricht @CEIRRNetwork #LoveVirology

This week's EEB Thurs Seminar features ALUM Dr Katia Koelle @KoelleLab presenting Using genetic data at multiple scales to understand constraints on viral adaptation. 3pm, 1010 Bio Sci Bldg and Zoom live, see poster #eventalanche #Genetics #diseases

Second PhD defended from the Koelle lab this week was from @m_a_martin. Mike not only did a phenomenal quantity of work, but it was of high quality as well! Mike collaborated with many folks, @SternLab @AnnePiantadosi @Ahmed_HBabiker among others. Congrats!!

For the second preprint announcement of the day, we’ve updated our earlier manuscript on using segregating sites trajectories of viral sequence data for epidemiological inference, which was led by @park_yeongseon. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

This was a highly collaborative project with (undergrad!) Jack Lin, Julie Zhu, Ruston Anita, @anice_lowen, and @dbweissman

Our recent work on the variolation hypothesis with regards to SARS-CoV-2 and mask wearing is now up on medRxiv. We show that mask wearing reduces the e probability of infection but does little to reduce severity given infection. medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Congratulations Dr. Allman 🎉

It’s PhD Defense day for @brent_allman!

congratulations to Dr. @brent_allman on his amazing PhD defense! i've been very lucky to get to co-advise brent with @KoelleLab