Simone Bianco

In my career, I have worked on a number of fields before settling onto studying how infectious agents evolve. Let's start from the beginning: I have a degree in high energy physics from the University of Pisa. While there, I worked on a statistical method to infer correlations between stock market prices. I then moved to the University of North Texas, where I got my PhD in physics. There, I worked on the statistical properties of blinking nanocrystals, I modeled the dynamics of enzyme folding, wrote about connecting music with brain activity, and tried to explain why it always rains in the same way, wherever you may be. Next, I went to the College of William and Mary, where I started working on disease dynamics. I first modeled how the various strains of dengue fever interact during circulation in the population. I then tried to guess what is the probability a disease can go extinct by random chance in a large population. My next leg was at the University of California, San Francisco, where I started working on viral evolution. I have uncovered the mechanisms RNA viruses like Dengue or Ebola employ to resist the selective pressure of the human host, when they transmit but also when they spread inside a host. Now at the IBM Almaden Research Center, I am continuing my investigation of the determinants of viral evolution, and am also helping MARS Inc. understand how we can make our food safer using genetic information of food microbes.

Dynamical Systems, Epidemiology and Control of Infectious Diseases, Physics, Theoretical Evolutionary Biology