Liliana Monteiro Salvador

The Computational Zoonosis lab takes an integrative and multidisciplinary One Health approach to develop computational and data-driven models for the study of bacterial pathogens. In doing so, the lab identifies the epidemiological, ecological, and evolutionary drivers involved in bacterial spillover events, amplification, and spread. Such approaches are essential for prioritizing surveillance strategies and predicting future disease emergence risk. At the core of the lab’s program is the curiosity to understand how interactions among individual organism’s scale to population-level dynamics. Current projects and collaborations focus on 1) studying the evolutionary processes and cross-species transmission patterns of zoonotic diseases; 2) connecting the evolutionary dynamics of infectious diseases with ecological processes through the characterization of underlying spatial and genetic patterns; 3) unraveling genomic signatures of host-pathogen interactions; and 4) developing computational tools to integrate genomic, epidemiological, and ecological data.

Dr. Salvador earned a B.Sc and a M.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Porto, and a Ph.D in Biology from the University of Lisbon, under the PhD Program in Computational Biology (collaboration between the Gulbenkian Institute of Science and Princeton University). Dr. Salvador did postdoctoral work in veterinary epidemiology and data science at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia jointly appointed in the Department of Infectious Diseases in the College of Veterinary Medicine and in the Institute of Bioinformatics.