Data-Sharing Seminar to Address Outbreak Surveillance
Dr. Karthik Gangavarapu, an investigator at Scripps Research, will deliver the next seminar in the Data Sharing and Reuse series, presented by NIH’s Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS). His talk, “Advancing Outbreak Surveillance: From Data Integration to Actionable Insights,” will take place on Nov. 8 at noon, ET.
Gangavarapu specializes in computational biology with an emphasis on infectious disease research. He has led large-scale collaborative projects that apply phylogenetic and phylodynamic methods to understand the transmission dynamics of rapidly evolving viruses, including Zika and SARS-CoV-2. In this effort, he has developed widely used software for genomic epidemiology, such as iVar and outbreak.info.
In response to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, the global scientific community through unprecedented effort has sequenced and shared over 17 million genomes as of October 2024. This high sampling rate provides a unique opportunity to track the evolution of the virus in near real-time.
More recently, wastewater sequencing has emerged as an alternative to sequencing clinical samples for cost-efficient genomic surveillance. Gangavarapu and colleagues developed outbreak.info as a platform that uses publicly available clinical and wastewater-based genomic data to provide insights for researchers, public health officials and the general public. Outbreak.info can be used for genomic surveillance and as a hypothesis-generation tool to understand the outbreaks at varying geographic and temporal scales.
ODSS hosts a seminar series to highlight exemplars of data sharing and reuse on the second Friday of each month at noon ET. This series highlights researchers who have taken existing data and found clever ways to reuse the data or generate new findings.
The series is open to the public; registration is required. To register, see: bit.ly/3UzPsd1.
For more information about the series, see: https://datascience.nih.gov/nih-data-sharing-and-reuse-seminar-series.