Perofsky<\/a> focuses on understanding and predicting how infectious diseases like flu, COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) spread and evolve.<\/p>\nHer path to becoming an infectious disease expert has been far from straightforward, taking her to Madagascar, Seattle and, now, Portland to study how the connections between people impact how diseases spread. Perofsky, who is also affiliated with Northeastern\u2019s globe-spanning Network Science Institute, uses everything from statistics to machine learning to ensure there is no surprise with future viral outbreaks.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s so much complexity to flu and so many different moving parts,\u201d said Perofsky, whose appreciation for disease surveillance was shaped by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, when the world had a front row seat to the infectious disease and the viral strains that cause it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m hoping I can contribute, in some way, to better understand the drivers of flu outbreaks and how we can translate that into making better forecast models,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Perofsky began her academic career studying frogs in the University of Georgia\u2019s herpetology lab, but her first course in disease ecology triggered a deep, longlasting love for public health. It combined all of her interests.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt goes back to my original interest in medicine. I was inspired by the public health, global health aspect of it, and it involved very rigorous math and statistical modeling,\u201d Perofsky said. \u201cNot that it\u2019s not important to study frogs and salamanders!\u201d<\/p>\n
After graduating in 2009 with a bachelor\u2019s degree in ecology, Perofsky began a virology fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. She followed that with a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, where her research on infectious diseases took her across the world to Madagascar. There, she set out to better understand how the social networks and relationships of lemurs, which are native to the African island, influenced the transmission of gut bacteria within a specific lemur colony. The goal was to create a map of these relationships, how their specific interactions spread bacteria and how that could inform disease response.<\/p>\n
She also still found time to co-host her weekly college radio talk show, \u201cThey Blinded Me with Science,\u201d on which she gave researchers a chance to share their work with the public.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of the joy of being an academic is being able to pursue things that interest you, and I\u2019m interested in a lot of different things,\u201d Perofsky said.<\/p>\n
In 2018, during a post-doctoral fellowship at the Fogarty International Center, NIH\u2019s American health research hub, Perofsky started the work that would eventually bring her to Northeastern. As a member of a small team studying infectious diseases, Perofsky explored how the evolution of the flu virus impacts its intensity from season to season.<\/p>\n
As part of that work, and through a collaboration with the Department of Defense, she created forecasts of flu and COVID-19 outbreaks for U.S. military bases. For the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, South Africa\u2019s public health organization, she later tracked how the severity of COVID-19 varied across the country\u2019s provinces and different age groups.<\/p>\n
In 2021, she joined the Seattle Flu Study, a community-wide pandemic surveillance platform, and started investigating one of her most pressing research questions: the ways human behavior impacts how infectious diseases and respiratory viruses travel. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a real-time case study.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen stay-at-home [orders] lifted, some pathogens came back right away,\u201d Perofsky said. \u201cThose were the non-enveloped viruses like rhinovirus, adenovirus, common cold type viruses. Others took a lot longer to return. Some of the viruses even had off season outbreaks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perofksy joined the Roux Institute in 2025 with the intent of continuing this work, while focusing on the still-unanswered questions around how different diseases impact the spread of one another. In Maine, she also found a fresh twist on work she\u2019d been doing for over a decade.<\/p>\n
Populations like Maine\u2019s, which are older and more rural, are significantly underrepresented in studies of how diseases evolve and spread, Perofsky said. But by working with EPISTORM, a Northeastern-led, federally-funded early disease detection center, and its healthcare partner Maine Health, Perofsky has access to information on health statistics, contact patterns for the entire U.S. population and flu forecasts, a level of data that is \u201cunusual\u201d for a community like Maine, she explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to just be publishing papers and that\u2019s my contribution to the field,\u201d Perofsky said. \u201cI really hope I could help in translating mechanistic insights into the drivers of these pathogen outbreaks into forecasting or public health response in general.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do Madagascar\u2019s lemurs and the COVID-19 pandemic have in common? The answer is Amanda Perofsky. A research…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[8607,1379,134,2054,202119,111,139,69,42057,169471],"class_list":{"0":"post-390721","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-covid","9":"tag-flu","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-infectious-disease","12":"tag-network-science-institute","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-portland","17":"tag-roux-institute"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}