Nathan Grubaugh, PhD

Nathan Grubaugh joined the faculty at Yale School of Public Health in 2018. Before going to graduate school, he spent ~7 years working in the biotech industry developing early phase vaccine candidates. He earned his MS in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University (2011) while conducting research at the NIH and the US Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (focus on mosquito-borne virus surveillance). Dr. Grubaugh earned his PhD in microbiology from Colorado State University in 2016 (focus on West Nile virus evolution), and went on to be a postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute to study the 2015-2017 Zika virus epidemic. Now at Yale, the Grubaugh Lab uses genomics and phylogenetics to uncover the epidemiological, ecological, and evolutionary determinants of virus outbreaks. They primarily focus on mosquito- and tick-borne viruses, like dengue, West Nile, and Powassan, that are increasingly spreading into new areas and have high outbreak potential. The Grubaugh Lab is diverse and multidisciplinary, including expertise in molecular biology, phylogenetics, statistics, and mathematical modeling. His lab was critical during the COVID-19 response, from designing and evaluating diagnostics (such as SalivaDirect) to establishing the Yale SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Surveillance Initiative to track emerging variants. Expanding on this work, the lab is an academic partner for the Pathogen Genomics Centers of Excellence to foster and improve innovation and technical capacity in pathogen genomics, molecular epidemiology, and bioinformatics to better prevent, control, and respond to microbial threats of public health importance. Read more about their team and work at grubaughlab.com.