Lambodhar Damodaran

Check out the preprint of a project I had the pleasure of working on with Nicola Mueller and Louise Moncla on North American H5 reassortment! Feel free to reach out with questions or thoughts!

Interesting paper on reassortment inference dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Check out this amazing work on reassortment of H3Nx viruses from the Moncla lab!

My privilege to share some lovely stories from the science community about what Sam Neill's timeless performance as Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park meant to them—and why it will continue to inspire kids to chase their own discoveries for years to come.

Check out this awesome work on reassortment in Hantaviruses headed by @ricardoriveroh.bsky.social and @punkrockscience.bsky.social. Great privilege to be involved!

In collaboration with Nicola Muller, and led by @lambod50.bsky.social, we have a new preprint out that's all about reassortment! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Using TargetedBeast, we built massive (9000 tips!) Bayesian phylogenies of North American H5Nx viruses, and inferred the host...

Amidst all the craziness in the world it's great to see folks like Dr. Legall providing critical perspectives on microbiology and the state of science. Please consider subscribing! substack.com/@noahlegall?...

Our paper on the Genomic Epidemiology of DENV2/3 in Colombia and the Americas is finally out @cp-cellreports.bsky.social, check it out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Big thanks to my collaborators @lambod50.bsky.social, @viralverity.bsky.social, @nathangrubaugh.bsky.social, and many others!

What makes bird flu spill over to humans? 4y funded PhD in the genomics and molecular virology behind zoonosis of avian influenza A virus, working with @tompeacock.bsky.social and others between Liverpool, Pirbright, and Uppsala! open to applications until next week!

Our lab's paper describing the North American H5N1 epizootic is out now in Nature! So thrilled to have this out, and congratulations to @lambod50.bsky.social for all the fantastic work on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our lab's first paper is out! Led by Jordan Ort, we developed NextClade datasets that enable rapid H5 clade assignment via NextClade. We deployed these during the start of the H5 cattle outbreak, and we finally published the paper in Virus Evolution academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...

Check out this cool preprint on Dengue epidemiology in Colombia! It was a pleasure to work with Ricardo on some of these interesting phylodynamic analyses!

Important work from Tavis Anderson and our Penn-CEIRR USDA colleagues: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

U.S. citizen interested in grad studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada)? Grad programs are re-opening applications of US programs for one week. With expedited decisions. U.S. Applicant Week: www.grad.ubc.ca/us-applicant... #AcademicChatter #Canada #GradSchool

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

Please watch. Powerful and chilling. 1: ‘Do not obey in advance.’ 20: ‘Be as courageous as you can!’

1/3 How long do you think it takes for highly pathogenic avian flu H5N1 sequences to be uploaded to GISAID after collection? How long should it be? In this commentary, we find a median delay of 228 days, with half the countries taking more than 6 months. rdcu.be/eeZGU @naturebiotech.bsky.social

I'm hopping on the market for postdocs outside the US... ...as soon as I finish some new analyses for a manuscript. Lmk if there are any good leads! I've been collecting random ones here and there, but it's more daunting now that my home country appears to be off the table.

In study led by @ckikawa.bsky.social & Andrea Loes, we use new assay to measure ~10,000 neutralization titers to recent influenza strains & show titers correlate w evolutionary success of viral strains Similar data could help forecast evolution for vaccine selection www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Postdoc Opportunity Got a PhD in disease evolution, or something similarly hardcore? Know your way around phylodynamics? Good. We need you. If you’re up for real-world research getting hands-on with fieldwork, sequencing, and making sense of viral evolution, apply here: jobs.inrae.fr/en/ot-25456.

Today @natmedicine.bsky.social published our study showing the older individuals born prior to 1968 have more antibodies that cross-react to #H5N1 relative to younger individuals. If H5N1 causes a pandemic, children will likely be the most susceptible. 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Highly suggest folks read up about Lysenkosism because it feels like that is where we are heading.

Check out some really cool work on canine influenza that was just published! Awesome collaborative team and looking forward to learning more about this very understudied pathogen!

Timely work on data integration for flu spillover prediction from @haileyrobertson.bsky.social and collaborators: "Understanding ecological systems using knowledge graphs: an application to highly pathogenic avian influenza" 🔓 academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

stopover duration of waterfowl predicts HPAI infection probability in backyard poultry from waterfowl, but ttiming has no effect. virulence and immunity impact the transmission risk to backyard poultry. 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New research alert! 🚨 Our paper describing the first evidence of the novel H18N12 Flu in Albiventris bats is out in @natureportfolio.nature.com Scientific Reports. Huge shoutout to my friend and colleague Daniel for leading this work. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper led by Rohan Simkin exploring global patterns of zoonotic hosts in the wildland-urban interface. WUIs are a complex and expanding contact zone with many potential host species that are likely to be consequential for spillover transmission on a rapidly urbanizing planet. bit.ly/WUI-zdx

Preprint out by me, Greg Albery, Barbara Han (@bahanbug.bsky.social ), and Amy Sweeny about how coinfection dynamics affect our ability to measure parasite/pathogen diversity. This research was funded by @viralemergence.org. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... 🧪🧵(1/4)

Call your senators! Do it today! It's better than wallowing

Very excited to see this paper out in the world. Absolutely monumental effort by @gorkalasso.bsky.social et al. to predict which filoviruses are likely to infect which bat species. Check out the thread below for details!

🚨😷🧪 NEW: A growing body of evidence shows that pandemics, biodiversity loss, and climate change are part of a broader polycrisis - but there are no simple solutions. A sweeping overview of "Pathogens and planetary change" for the first issue of @natrevbiodiv.bsky.social, out now 🔓 rdcu.be/d6lHl

Hi! I'm new to blue sky, and I have a new preprint out! 🥳🥳 This work is the first chapter of my dissertation: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... The study was completed with the @viralemergence.org with support from @danjbecker.bsky.social, @colincarlson.bsky.social, and Amanda Vicente-Santos ☺️🦇⚕️🦠👩‍🔬 (1/5)

Really important work from the Moncla lab led by Jordan Ort on H5 clade assignment just preprinted! The framework that was developed is a critical tool to study virus evolution and epidemiology. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hello influenza enthusiasts! You may be interested in our recent publication linked below. We used multi-strain serology to figure out who got infected with which A/H3N2 influenza strain and when, allowing us to reconstruct epidemiological patterns back to 1968 stratified by time, age and location.

New preprint 🦠‼️ How do you tell apart dengue, chikungunya, and Zika? Big findings in 19 years of pediatric cohort data: lots of afebrile cases of dengue and Zika, which would be missed by most case definitions, and look very similar; plus, big differences by age. 🔓👉 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

check out this really cool work just published on raccoon rabies by the very talented @gabriella-veytsel.bsky.social ! academic.oup.com/ve/advance-a...

Really excited to share that my postdoctoral work on HPAI in North America is now preprinted! Please feel free to reach out with any feedback and thoughts! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you do dengue virus sequencing +/- phylogenetic analysis, check out our new system for classifying lineages. Led by Verity Hill, this was a large collaborative effort by dengue researchers from 14 countries. Paper -> journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... Website-> dengue-lineages.org

Great program by Alexey Markin et al.!

Last week, a teenager in British Columbia contracted H5N1, the first human case acquired in Canada. The BC CDC and and Canadian Food Inspection Agency have released sequences from this infected person and domestic and wild birds sampled in BC, which we've just added to Nextstrain. A thread:

Pandemic Risk Assessment for a Swine Influenza A Virus in Comparative Human Substrates https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.24.581872v1

Have you been wondering what's going on with avian influenza in North America? Check out our lab's @nextstrain narrative on phylodynamic analysis of H5Nx evolution and transmission here! nextstrain.org/groups/moncl...