Session Chair Prof. James Wood Co-Director (The University of Cambridge)

Speaker 1 Dr. Raina Plowright (Cornell University)

Talk Title  Coronavirus dynamics in bat populations in space and time

Biosketch Dr. Raina Plowright’s research program develops the science of pandemic prevention through transdisciplinary leadership, innovation, and translation. Her work advances a One Health approach by bridging the best available science in disease dynamics with effective public health practice and meaningful policy. Her systematic and interdisciplinary approach focuses on four areas of inquiry: Transmission of pathogens between species, Links between land-use change and pathogen spillover, Dynamics and drivers of viral pathogens in reservoir host populations, and Implementation of science for the protection of ecosystem and human health.

Speaker 2 Dr. Michael Colin Letko (Washington State University)

Talk Title Assessing the zoonotic risk of coronaviruses with functional viromics

Biosketch While our understanding of the viruses circulating in wildlife around the globe is ever expanding at the sequence level, our understanding of these viruses in the laboratory, is far more limited. Therefore, we do not know if any of these newly discovered viruses are capable of transmitting to humans or domestic animals. Ultimately, my research is aimed at annotating the virome with functional data acquired in the laboratory setting. From my graduate training in the department of microbiology at Mount Sinai in New York City, to my post-doctoral fellowship at the NIH’s Rocky Mountain Labs facility in Montana, I have acquired an extensive expertise in virus-host protein interactions, molecular virology and reverse genetics. Since 2016, my research has primarily been focused on the betacoronaviruses that include MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. Recently, I developed a platform to characterize receptor preference and cell entry of the entire subgenus of sarbecoviruses, which includes SARS-CoV-2. This work showed that many of these related viruses are also capable of infecting human cells, and the platform was used to rapidly demonstrate the receptor for SARS- CoV-2 just 12 days after the virus genome was published. In my current, tenure-track research position as assistant professor at Washington State University’s Paul G. Allen School of Global Health, my lab has expanded on this work to include additional virus families, test novel viruses for vaccine resistance and computationally model our data to identify broader molecular trends underlying cross-species compatibility.