Francois Balloux

Francois Balloux is the Director of the UCL Genetics Institute,[1] and a Professor of Computational Systems Biology at University College London.[2]

Francois Balloux

He earned a Master's degree in 1996 and a Doctorate in 2000 from the University of Lausanne. He then completed postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh. Balloux was a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, between 2002 and 2007, before taking a position as a Reader in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. In 2012, Balloux became a Professor at University College London.[2]

His research lies at the interface of Genomics, Epidemiology, Evolution and Ecology. The main focus of his work is on the reconstruction of disease outbreaks and epidemics of human and wildlife pathogens,[3][4][5] and the emergence of antimicrobial resistance.[6][7][8] His work has been cited over 20,000 times on Google Scholar.[9]

Together with his colleague Dr Lucy Van Dorp, they led a team of researchers in the analysis of the first large-scale analysis of 7666 complete SARS-Cov-2 genomes, the agent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work confirmed a host jump of SARS-Cov-2 into the human population in late 2019, extensive global transmission from early on in the pandemic, and identified a list of 198 candidate mutations for ongoing adaptation to its novel human host.[10]