The foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) severely affects hooved livestock, with a major economic impact particularly on low-income countries in Asia and Africa. Informed decisions about controlling FMDV outbreaks can only be made by exploiting the relation between the strain responsible for the outbreak and known viral strains. The FMDV World Reference Laboratory at The Pirbright Institute (TPI) has sequenced an extensive catalogue of representative viruses, sampling infected animals and vaccine strains across a broad geographic and temporal range. Given the complex population structure and molecular biology of FMDV, sophisticated data analysis methods are necessary to extract and provide reliable information on new viral strains.

The FMDV Toolkit portal was recently initiated by the Integrative Biology and Bioinformatics group at TPI. It aims to empower the FMDV research community around the world, and especially researchers in low-income countries, by democratising access to such analysis methods, and making them available through a user-friendly web interface. The main goal of the proposed PhD project will be the development of novel statistical and visualisation techniques for the FMDV Toolkit to provide useful and timely information to aid the control of outbreaks in resource-poor countries.

You will have full flexibility into the direction of the project, as multiple sources of information will require integration of diverse statistical, computational and bioinformatic approaches. You will mainly focus on the back-end of the FMDV Toolkit portal, but will also have the opportunity to implement part of the front-end, for example, building a visual interface for the results of the computation.