David Rasmussen
Associate Professor
University Faculty Scholar
Dept. of Entomology and Plant Pathology
Bioinformatics Research Center
Email: drasmus (at) ncsu.edu
David Rasmussen joined NC State as a cluster hire in Emerging Plant Disease and Global Food Security in 2018. David did his Ph.D. with Dr. Katia Koelle at Duke University and then a postdoc with Dr. Tanja Stadler at ETH Zurich. During both his Ph.D. and postdoc, he developed phylodynamic methods for tracking the spread of pathogens using genomic sequence data and applied them to study the transmission dynamics of human viruses such as dengue, influenza and HIV. At NC State, he continues to develop phylodynamic methods for human and agricultural pathogens with an emphasis on methods that accommodate non-neutral (adaptive) evolution and recombination. More generally, he is interested in the ecology and evolution of infectious pathogens of all shapes and sizes, particularly how they adapt to novel hosts and evolve in the face of fitness trade-offs between environments.