Since my PhD work on African trypanosomes and their antigenic variation (VSG) gene repertoire, I have been fascinated with the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens and infectious agents. Shaped by  processes such as gene duplication, point mutation, horizontal gene transfer, recombination, and gene conversion, and under the selection of ecological and epidemiological forces at higher scales, genomic evolutionary trajectories and their optima can be studied with mathematical models. In this research line, we have developed stochastic modeling frameworks that capture some of the governing principles of diversification, its transient dynamics, and resulting equilibria (Gjini et al. 2014). We have integrated such models with Bayesian estimation, to extract the underlying process parameters from parasite genetic data (Gjini et al. 2012). More recently we have contributed to mechanistic perspectives on evolution of anti-bacterial protection in primates.

Related work:

• Singh et al. (2021). Cell Host & Microbe doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2020.12.017