Welcome!

Assistant Professor Stephanie N. Seifert in the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health, is the Primary Investigator of the Molecular Ecology of Zoonotic and Animal Pathogens (MEZAP) Laboratory. Research in the MEZAP lab focuses on the central question, What shapes virus populations? The factors and processes that shape virus populations across time and space range from ecosystem dynamics to molecular interactions. Thus, research in the MEZAP Lab is interdisciplinary by design, spanning laboratory-based experimental work, field ecology, and ecological and evolutionary modeling. We design new tools and approaches to better understand, and ultimately predict, cross-species transmission of viruses and other pathogens. Recent work in the MEZAP lab includes studying the dynamics of filoviruses and henipaviruses in African bats, the population genomics of MERS-CoV in camels and SARS-CoV-2 in humans, within-host evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in a mink model, and predicting reservoirs of orthopoxviruses using a machine learning approach incorporating both host and viral trait data.