MrVinicius Franceschi

After working as a Research Assistant in Erik Volz's group for the past three years uncovering transmission fitness and virulence of SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1, I recently (October 2024) started my PhD in Clinical Medicine (Public Health) under Erik's and Nuno Faria's supervision and funded by the Imperial College London President's Scholarship.

My PhD research is focused on tracking and predicting the evolution of viral variants using genomic epidemiology, deep mutational scanning, and machine learning methods. This will be accomplished by building hierarchical, latent-variable, and advanced machine learning models. This work will potentially contribute to: (i) variant forecasting, (ii) vaccine updates targeting fast-growing variants with limited cross-reactivity to previously circulating lineages; and (iii) generation of early warning signals (EWS) for future epidemic waves. Although initial analyses are being performed using SARS-CoV-2 data, this framework will likely be transferable to other pathogens, e.g. influenza, dengue, HIV, etc.