Prof Gavin James Smith

Programme Director, Signature Research Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases
Duke-NUS Medical School

Professor Gavin Smith is the Director of the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) at Duke-NUS Medical School.

I am broadly interested in the ecology, genetic and antigenic evolution, vaccine strain selection, molecular diagnostics, pathogen discovery, population dynamics, molecular epidemiology, and interspecies transmission of infectious diseases. My research aims to understand viral disease ecosystems in Asia, including at the animal-human interface, to inform and enhance disease control. While I primarily work on influenza and coronaviruses, my lab studies a wide range of respiratory and enteric viruses. I conduct human and animal disease surveillance throughout Asia via an extensive network of collaborators. The gathered information is used in large-scale computational analyses to generate hypotheses on the role of virus mutations on their phenotype, such as fitness or virulence. We then test these hypotheses in the laboratory using tissue culture and animal models