The Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health studies the frequency, distribution, and determinants of disease in humans, a fundamental science of public health. In addition to pursuing ground-breaking global research initiatives, we educate and prepare future medical leaders and practitioners as part of our mission to ignite positive changes in the quality of health across the world.

The Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD), within the Department of Epidemiology, is a key center for research and policy analysis on SARS-CoV-2 and has been at the forefront of the COVID-19 response. CCDD’s team, comprised of faculty, researchers, postdocs, and graduate students, focuses on innovative modeling techniques, interdisciplinary methods, and data analysis to understand infectious disease dynamics.

To learn more about the CCDD and the affiliated labs, please see https://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/.

The postdoctoral fellow would support Drs. Lipsitch and Hanage labs at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu) leading work to extend our understanding of the role of negative frequency-dependent selection in Streptococcus pneumoniae (see below).

The postdoctoral research fellow will lead work to extend our understanding of the role of negative frequency-dependent selection in Streptococcus pneumoniae. This concept that Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) population structure is determined by a process of negative frequency-dependent selection on the accessory genome has been supported by both cross sectional and longitudinal comparisons, with the advent of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines providing a strong perturbation to test the hypothesis (1, 2). Many questions persist about the generality of this phenomenon, the mechanism by which it operates, the genes involved, and so forth. The postdoctoral research fellow will lead work to devise and apply approaches to answer these remaining questions with the scientific goal of understanding the mechanism, and the public health goal of improving predictions of evolutionary trajectories. This work will be with Drs. Lipsitch and Hanage, and collaborators in other institutions.

1. Corander J, Fraser C, Gutmann MU, et al. Frequency-dependent selection in vaccine-associated pneumococcal population dynamics. Nat Ecol Evol. 2017;1(12):1950-60. doi:10.1038/s41559-017-0337-x
2. Azarian T, Martinez PP, Arnold BJ, et al. Frequency-dependent selection can forecast evolution in Streptococcus pneumoniae. PLoS Biol. 2020;18(10):e3000878. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000878