Searching for COVID-19 Patients in a Hypercube
Speaker: Wilfred Ndifon & Lavanya Singh, UKZN
Abstract: We will present a new method for pooled testing, based on the geometry of a hypercube, which has significant advantages over alternatives. The method is already a key component of the national strategy for COVID-19 testing in Rwanda and is being trialed in other countries. We will describe the mathematical details of the method, including its theoretical failure rate, its advantages over alternatives, and its limitations. We will also describe beautiful experiments validating the method in the lab, attempts at its robotic automation, and real-time tests conducted on a South African rugby team. Based on joint work with Leon Mutesa, Neil Turok, Tulio de Oliveira et al.
Bio: Wilfred Ndifon is a Professor of Theoretical Biology at AIMS, and the AIMS Network’s Research Director. He spent several years at Princeton University studying theoretical biology with Simon Levin, graduating with a Master’s (Sep 2005 – Jun 2007) and Ph.D. (Feb 2008 – Apr 2009) degrees. Before then, he had obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Morgan State University and then spent one and a half years doing independent research on RNA folding dynamics and other topics (e.g. see this paper) while developing commercial software as a hobby.
He applied mathematical thinking and modeling to discover mechanistic insights about diverse phenomena relevant to adaptive immunity. He has thus advanced the mechanistic understanding of, among others, the formation of T cell receptors via genetic recombination; the collapse of T cell diversity in the elderly; immune evasion by influenza viruses; the original antigenic sin; and hemagglutination-inhibition. Other topics of interest include theory-driven machine learning as an aid to inductive inference and prediction in biology and medicine; quantization of health; and phenotype accessibility in evolutionary landscapes. He also investigates translational applications of insights obtained from basic scientific work.
Lavanya Singh is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in the Discipline of Virology. She holds a BSc (Honours) in Microbiology, a BSc in Microbiology and Genetics, and a Masters in Medical Science (Virology), all from UKZN. Her research focuses on HIV genotyping related to treatment and clinical management, specifically the molecular epidemiology of HIV-2 in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.