Since the start of my DPhil at Univ, my research interest has been centred on developing quantitative methods to understand how viruses with a significant disease burden and pandemic potential evolve over time, both within individuals and across the population. By identifying factors that influence virus evolutionary rates, my work generates new insights into the evolutionary origins of viruses and their evolutionary dynamics over time.

Ever since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been involved in Covid research, focusing on understanding the evolutionary dynamics of the virus responsible for Covid, SARS-CoV-2, and how it spread in different areas of the world such as Iran, where they were hit hard by Covid but also had limited epidemiological and genomic information about the virus.

Later in my DPhil, I became particularly interested in understanding the evolutionary origins of Variants of Concern of SARS-CoV-2, such as the Alpha and Omicron variants, which spread globally and caused new waves of infection. I explored how their origin may be linked to the accelerated evolution of the virus within chronically infected individuals. We continue to see these emergent virus variants as the virus continues to circulate in the general population. These emergent variants are often genetically distinct from other circulating variants and allow the virus to sustain transmission and spread in the population by evading host immunity.

With the same research interests that I had during my DPhil, I started my postdoctoral work at the Nuffield Department of Medicine here in Oxford to better understand these questions at a fundamental level. Recently, in my first article as a postdoctoral researcher, we published a paper in Nature where we found a high prevalence of persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections within the general population. These infections are believed to be the most likely source for generating new variants of the virus. Our findings suggest that these infections are much more prevalent in the population than previously thought and are also associated with higher odds of experiencing long COVID compared to individuals with more typical (shorter) COVID infections. These findings emphasise the importance of continued surveillance of the virus to monitor the emergence and spread of new variants and to gain a fundamental understanding of the natural history and evolution of novel pathogens with pandemic potential.

Dr Mahan Ghafari  (2018, DPhil Interdisciplinary Bioscience)

You can read the article in Nature here.

Published: 30 April 2024

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