After a PhD and some postdoctoral research in theoretical particle physics, I joined the group of Christophe Fraser, at Imperial College London 2014-2016, and at the Big Data Institute since. I do research on the evolutionary epidemiology of viruses: how they spread, how they change, and how they damage our health. I use statistical modelling, mathematical modelling and genomic methods.

My publications are here*. Educational/explanatory material I've written for students and researchers is here.

Throughout 2020 and 2021 I mostly worked on COVID-19, in particular using mathematical and statistical modelling to understand how helpful digital contact tracing (using mobile phone apps) is. We first proposed using this new public health intervention for COVID-19 here and first evaluated its effect on slowing viral spread here. Read more about our group's COVID-19 work here.

Otherwise I've mostly worked on the BEEHIVE project: analysing HIV genetic data, together with clinical data about the individuals with those viruses, to better understand how the virus affects infection severity. With Christophe and François Blanquart I discovered the VB variant of HIV. I wrote the tools shiver for reconstructing HIV (and other viral) genomes from short pieces of DNA, and phyloscanner (with Matthew Hall and Christophe) for analysing within- and between-host pathogen genetic diversity. I've helped a little in BEEHIVE's sister projects PANGEA and AMPHEUS. Further explanations of this work are in my teaching materials (and the publications of course).

If you're not a robot, please email me at chris wymant bdi ox ac uk, replacing those five spaces with . @ . . . respectively

* this link provides access to the only publication that's not open acces: Jean & Wymant, Science 2019, on academic institutional policy for flying.