David Rasmussen

Bio

David Rasmussen joined NC State as a cluster hire in Emerging Plant Disease and Global Food Security in January 2018. David did his Ph.D. with Dr. Katia Koelle at Duke University and then a postdoc with Dr. Tanja Stadler at ETH Zurich. During both his Ph.D. and postdoc, he developed phylodynamic methods for tracking the spread of pathogens using genomic sequence data and applied them to study the transmission dynamics of human viruses such as dengue, influenza and HIV. As a member of both the Bioinformatics Research Center and Dept. of Entomology and Plant Pathology at NC State, he plans to adapt and improve these methods for studying agricultural pathogens. He is also generally interested in the ecology and evolution of infectious pathogens of all shapes and sizes, particularly how they adapt to constantly changing host environments and emerge on novel hosts.

Area(s) of Expertise

David leads the Phylodynamics Research Group at NC State which develops new phylogenetic and computational methods for genomic epidemiology. Recent work by the group has centered around quantifying the fitness of viral pathogens in terms of their transmission potential between hosts using genomic sequence data. David's group also studies how plant viruses such as Tomato spotted wilt virus adapt to novel hosts and expand their host range by resolving fitness tradeoffs between hosts.