Trevor Bedford (virologist)

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Trevor Bedford
Education University of Chicago (BA)
Harvard University (Ph.D.)
Known forFirst warning of community spread of COVID-19 in the United States
Medical career
ProfessionComputational virologist

Trevor Bedford is an American computational virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. [1] His research focuses on tools to speed the process of using genomic sequencing data to map the evolutionary trees of pathogens -- and thus yield insights into geographic spread, epidemic growth rate, and vaccine efficacy. [2] Starting with an early system called Nextflu in 2015, Bedford and Richard Neher co-developed Nextstrain, an open source system for computing viral evolutionary trees from sequencing data. [3] In 2020, Bedford was able to use data from the Flu Tracking Project and Nextstrain to first document community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States. [4]

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In 2021, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Bedfords work, naming him a 2021 MacArthur fellow. [5]

Education and career

Bedford graduated with a BA in Biological Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2002 and obtained a Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University in 2008. [1]

In 2020, he posted on Twitter about the first known community transmission of COVID-19 in the United States. That action was later cited as one of the actions that helped galvanize a rapid response to Covid on a national scale. [6]

In September 2021, he received a 7-year $9 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Later that same month, he was named as part of that year's MacArthur Fellows Program class. [7]

Selected publications

References

  1. 1 2 "Trevor Bedford, Ph.D." Fred Hutch. January 30, 2020. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
  2. ↑ "Trevor Bedford". www.macfound.org. Retrieved December 19, 2025.
  3. ↑ "Viral Outbreak Tracking Software 'Nextstrain' Wins Open Science Prize". Global Biodefense. February 28, 2017. Retrieved December 19, 2025.
  4. ↑ Fink, Sheri (March 9, 2020) [March 1, 2020]. "Coronavirus May Have Spread in U.S. for Weeks, Gene Sequencing Suggests". The New York Times.
  5. ↑ "MacArthur Award Winner Says He Carries The Weight Of Ending The Pandemic On His Shoulders". www.wbur.org. September 28, 2021. Retrieved December 19, 2025.
  6. ↑ Doughton, Sandi (June 1, 2020). "250,000 people now follow this Fred Hutch scientist on Twitter. We talk to this leading voice of the coronavirus pandemic". The Seattle Times. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
  7. ↑ McCarthy, Ellen (September 28, 2021). "MacArthur will give 25 new fellows $625,000 each to pursue 'high-risk, high-reward' work". The Washington Post. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
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