Members
Michael A. Martin, PhD
I am an evolutionary biologist and infectious disease epidemiologist with a focus on using genomic data to better understand the dynamics of human pathogens. Broadly speaking, I am interested in identifying novel data signatures in pathogen genomic data and developing quantitative analytical methods to generate epidemiological and evolutionary insights from those signals. My work spans biological scales, from within-host pathogen evolution to pathogen dynamics on the host population scale. I have a particular interest in analyses that link these scales, e.g. through the transmission bottleneck.
I am currently a post-doctoral research fellow as a part of the Infectious Disease Dynamics group at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. My primary appointment is in the Department of Epidemiology, working with Dr. Derek Cummings although I also work closely with Dr. M. Kate Grabowski in the Department of Pathology at the School of Medicine. I am focused on a number of infectious disease-genomes related research projects including the evolution and transmission of HIV antiretroviral therapy (ART) resistance, the genomic epidemiology of Neisseria gonorrhoeae in Uganda, and inter-and intra-strain dynamics of dengue virus. Much of my work is rooted in the development of new analytical methods, particularly those that are scalable to large data sets.
I completed my doctoral training in Dr. Katia Koelle’s group in the Population Biology, Ecology, and Evolution graduate program. My work there was funded in part by an NIH NIAID F31 fellowship to study the evolution of influenza defective viral genomes within- and between-hosts. I also spent significant time researching SARS-CoV-2 during my doctoral training including estimating the transmission bottleneck and phylodynamic epidemiological modeling.
Prior to my doctoral training I earned a master’s in epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where I did research in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics with Dr. Bill Hanage. Here I mainly focused on the within-host genomic diversity of M. tuberculosis.
Principal Investigator
Michael A. Martin, PhD
I am an evolutionary biologist and infectious disease epidemiologist.