Bastiaan van der Roest
UMC Utrecht
Fellowship project title: Infecting with software: bring R packages for outbreak analysis to epidemiologists.
The goal: Developing and spreading the word about phybreak, initiated at RIVM and implemented in R, and further developed in the Fellow’s PhD project.
The why: As seen during the pandemic outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, knowledge of transmission routes is of great importance to understanding virus transmission. Adding whole-genome sequences of pathogens to epidemiological data such as time of sampling or contact information, can help identifying who infected whom. Various statistical methods have been developed to do this, often starting from a specific use case or model.
