The Duration of Immunity Following COVID-19 Infection
Speaker: Jeffrey Townsend, Yale University
Bio: Professor Townsend earned his Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 2002, under Daniel Hartl. His Ph.D. research using S. cerevisiae was the first population genetic analysis of genome-wide gene expression variation. He then became a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley, working on functional genomics with Neurospora crassa. Townsend's academic career began as an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut in 2004 and continued at Yale University in 2006. By 2013, he was an Associate Professor focusing on statistical models of disease spread and cancer evolution. He was named Elihu Professor in 2017 and was appointed a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering in 2019 for his innovative population biology research. In 2021, he became Co-Chair-Elect of the Cancer Evolution Working Group of the American Association for Cancer Research and was appointed Co-Director of Yale Cancer Center's Genetics, Genomics, and Epigenetics Program in 2022. In 2023, he was elevated to Co-Chair of the Cancer Evolution Working Group.