Fangfang Guo

Bio

I graduated with a PhD in Plant Pathology from China Agricultural University, where my research focused mainly on the spatial epidemiology of rice blast in China, including among other things, developing a model to forecast rice blast. During my postdoc program in the Phylodynamics Research Group, I developed a new recombination-aware phylogeographic and demographic inference approach known as the structured coalescence with ancestral recombination (SCAR) as part of a USDA NIFA supported project. The SCAR method has been instrumental in tracking the spread of the fungal pathogen, Aspergillus flavus, through complex landscapes.

I am currently a postdoc in Dr. Peter Ojiambo’s lab, working on an NSF-EEID funded project to develop computational methods to impute unknown locations of multiple sources of epidemic outbreak and develop Bayesian models that incorporate uncertainty and the influence of ecological factors in the long-distance spread of cucurbit downy mildew in the eastern US.