About
Partner notification (PN, or contact tracing) is a process in which contacts of detected infected individuals are identified and offered testing for infection. It has been applied to various
infectious diseases, including syphilis, HIV, tuberculosis, Ebola and COVID-19, and
shown to successfully reduce transmission. For instance, for HIV, partner notification showed increased early referral and initiation of treatment, and several countries include it in their national HIV testing services policies [WHO].
Phylodynamics bridges the gap between classical epidemiology and pathogen
genome sequence data by estimating epidemiological parameters (e.g., the average number of
secondary infections Re) from pathogen phylogenetic trees [Grenfell 2004]. The models used in phylodynamics typically assume that the sampling procedure is independent between infected individuals, and do not account for PN.
This project aims at developing phylodynamic models accounting for partner notification (PN), and applying them to study PN impact in containing the spread of epidemics of HIV and other pathogens.