Rate My Professor Trevor Bedford

Trevor Bedford is a Professor in the Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, and Epidemiology Program of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division and a Professor in the Herbold Computational Biology Program of the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He serves as an Affiliate Professor in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Epidemiology at the University of Washington and as an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Bedford received a BA in Biological Sciences with honors from the University of Chicago in 2002 and a PhD in Biology from Harvard University in 2008. His early career included positions as an HHMI Associate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan from 2008 to 2011, followed by EMBO Long Term Fellow and Newton International Fellow in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh from 2011 to 2013. He joined Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center as Assistant Professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease and Public Health Sciences Divisions in 2013, advancing to Associate Professor in 2018 and full Professor in 2022.

Bedford's research in Biology centers on viral genomics and computational modeling to track, predict, and combat infectious disease outbreaks across pathogens including influenza, Ebola, Zika, dengue, mpox, and SARS-CoV-2. His interests encompass computational molecular evolution, phylogenetics, infectious disease epidemiology, antigenic evolution, immune dynamics, and Bayesian statistics. As co-founder of Nextstrain, an open-source platform for real-time viral surveillance, he has enabled improved influenza vaccine selection, Ebola epidemic containment, and SARS-CoV-2 evolution mapping. Bedford led the Seattle Flu Study, identifying community transmission of COVID-19 in February 2020. Notable publications include "Cryptic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Washington state" (Science, 2020), "Fine-scale patterns of SARS-CoV-2 spread from identical pathogen sequences" (Nature, 2025), "Timely vaccine strain selection and genomic surveillance improves evolutionary forecast accuracy of seasonal influenza A/H3N2" (eLife, 2025), "Seasonal influenza viruses show distinct adaptive dynamics during growth in chicken eggs" (Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2025), and "High-throughput neutralization measurements correlate strongly with evolutionary success of human influenza strains" (eLife, 2025). His contributions have earned the MacArthur Fellowship (2021-2026), HHMI Investigator appointment (2021), Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences (2016-2020), Open Science Prize (2017), and Fortune 40 Under 40 (2020). With over 23,000 citations, Bedford's work has profoundly influenced genomic epidemiology and public health responses to pandemics.