Caroline Colijn is a Professor of Mathematics who works at the interface of mathematics, evolution, infection and public health, and leads the MAGPIE research group. She joined SFU's Mathematics Department in 2018 as a Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Infection, Evolution and Public Health. She has broad interests in applications of mathematics to questions in evolution and public health. Contact ccolijn@sfu.ca.
Website: carolinecolijn.ca

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Paul Tupper is a Professor of Mathematics whose research spans mathematical applications in linguistics (phonetics and phonology) and biology (biodiversity and epidemiology). He also works on the theory of diversities, a framework that extends the classical notion of metric space.

https://www.sfu.ca/~pft3/

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Jessica Stockdale is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics with interests in mathematical and statistical modelling of infectious disease outbreaks, particularly using genomic data. Before moving to SFU in October 2018, she completed her PhD at the University of Nottingham, UK, working on Bayesian computational methods for stochastic epidemics. Her current projects focus on modelling of pathogen genomic data to better understand transmission and evolution, and predict future infection.

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Cedric Chauve is a Professor of Mathematics who holds a PhD and Habilitation in Theoretical Computer Science from Bordeaux University. His research interests include the development of algorithms and software tool for analyzing genomic data, in comparative genomics, cancer genomics and pathogen genomics.

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Ailene MacPherson is an Assitant Professor of Mathematics who uses mathematical and statistical tools to address questions at the intersection of evolution, ecology, and epidemiology. Ailene develops phylodynamic (phylogenies+ epidemiological dynamics) methods to understand and control ongoing epidemics. In particular, Ailene's research focuses on quantifying how both host and pathogen genetics shape disease spread and severity. Additionally, Ailene strives to understand how these complex coevolutionary interactions shape the biological diversity of the natural world by studying the genetics and evolutionary dynamics of long-term associations between hosts and their infectious pathogens.

https://amacp.github.io/

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Ben Ashby is a Professor of Mathematics. He is a mathematical biologist interested in the ecology and evolution of hosts and parasites. He uses mathematical models to study how parasites spread through populations and how traits such as infectivity and virulence evolve, and in turn how this affects the evolution of host traits such as resistance or mating strategies. His research covers a broad range of topics in biology, including infectious diseases, the evolution and maintenance of diversity across space and time, sexual selection and reproductive strategies, and niche evolution.

https://ecoevotheory.com/

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Dr. Lloyd T. Elliott is an Assistant Professor of Big Data in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University, and an Honorary Academic Visitor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. His research interests include machine learning, brain imaging genetics, phylogenetics and Bayesian nonparametrics. Dr. Elliott collaborates with the MAGPIE group on COVID-19 epidemiological modelling. He also serves with CGEn's HostSeq project for SARS-CoV-2 host genetics.

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Aniket is is a Postdoctoral Fellow whose interests primarily lie in the fields of discrete mathematics, combinatorial optimization. He works on designing optimization-based techniques to address questions posed in bioinformatics.

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Bradley is a Postdoctoral Fellow who develops and analyzes methods and software for understanding the dynamics and evolution of human pathogens between and within host. These range from estimating integration dates of HIV proviral sequences in the HIV persistent reservoir, characterizing transmission in tuberculosis outbreaks, and data visualization. The unifying feature of Bradley’s research is the use of phylogenetic trees, which encode the evolutionary relationships of sequences. By exploiting the evolutionary characteristics of these pathogen systems, we can get a grasp on their dynamics ultimately leading to insights for drug and vaccine discovery and to inform policy makers towards the care and management of infectious diseases.

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Alex is a Postdoctoral Fellow working in mathematical biology with interests in connections between the epidemiology of infectious diseases and their evolution. Current projects are concerned with bacterial infections such as tuberculosis (TB), and he has long-standing interests in respiratory viruses (including SARS-CoV-2).  He uses dynamical systems models and leverages genomic data through the lens of statistical phylogenetics.

https://www.sfu.ca/~abeams/

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Jennifer is a PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics. Her research focuses on statistical methodology to infer pathogen transmission from genomic data.

Mahdi's work involves using epidemiology and evolutionary approaches to examine bark beetle infestations. he is interested in exploring multi-scale questions that occur in a variety of fields, broadly speaking falling under the following categories:

1. Investigating the dynamics within the host (tree) using computational fluid dynamics approaches.
2. Creating a brand-new model to depict an outbreak of the bark beetle while refining the presumptions made in earlier literature studies. and evaluating the severity of many parameters to limit the outbreak.
3. Examining issues brought up in the study of evolution, such as local adaptation.

Yexuan's interests lie in Ancestral State Reconstruction methods which are widely used in phylogenetics for identifying the character states of evolutionary ancestors. He is also interested in using mathematical models of infectious diseases to study their spread and the ways in which this connects to coalescent theory.

Jamie is a master’s student in Applied and Computational Mathematics. His research interests are in evolutionary epidemiology, particularly in how stochasticity leads to coherence resonance in epidemic models eliciting quasi periodic behaviour and how it affects evolutionary outcomes. As a research assistant in his undergrad, he developed mathematical models describing the population dynamics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Panama which were used to measure the impact and cost of targeted treatment intervention programmes.

Olivia is an MSc student in applied and computational mathematics at SFU, under the supervision of Ailene MacPherson and Ben Ashby. Her focus is on quantifying the “disease-diversity relationship” across different forms of global change. She aims to identify which forms of global change trigger an amplification effect (i.e., more biodiversity implies more disease) and which trigger a dilution effect (i.e., more biodiversity implies less disease).

Javad's research interests lie in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, particularly competition between populations. He also studies biodiversity measures and their properties, with the goal of improving how we quantify and interpret biological diversity.