Dr. Katrina Lythgoe

Biography

Katrina Lythgoe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford and serves as a Group Leader at the Big Data Institute. She is also a Tutorial Fellow at Brasenose College. Her research focuses on the evolution of viral infections using a variety of approaches including population genetics, deterministic and stochastic modelling, and evolutionary analysis of viral sequence data. The key objectives of her work are to produce predictive models of how viral populations evolve in response to changes such as new transmission events and zoonotic jumps, and the responses to immunisation and treatment interventions. She is particularly interested in the evolutionary and ecological processes influencing viral infections across different ecological scales and aims to integrate these understandings to enhance genomic surveillance during outbreaks. Her current research projects include analyzing deep long-read sequencing data to understand the evolution of within-host population structures of viral populations like Hepatitis C, and developing methods to identify persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections within household transmission chains.

Research Interests