Rate My Professor Trevor Bedford

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.