Profile
Dr Mahan Ghafari
Profile
I studied physics at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, then completed an MSc in Physics at Emory University in the US. In 2017 I spent a year as a visiting graduate student in Genetics at the University of Cambridge before moving to Oxford Zoology in 2018 for a DPhil in Interdisciplinary Bioscience, which I completed in 2022, after which I moved to the Big Data Institute as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2025 I was awarded a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award to establish an independent research group in the Department of Biology, became affiliated with the Pandemic Sciences Institute, and was elected Kemp Junior Research Fellow in Medical Sciences at Lincoln College.
- Research
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My research investigates how viruses with pandemic potential evolve over time and across hosts, and how this affects their ability to infect, persist and evade immunity. I combine viral genomic data from large surveillance programmes with statistical, phylogenetic and population genetics methods to identify episodes of accelerated evolution that may give rise to highly divergent variants. A key strand of my work is improving molecular clock models by accounting for biological and methodological sources of rate variation, enabling more reliable reconstruction of viral timelines and spillover events.
- Select publications
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Ghafari M et al. Prevalence of persistent SARS-CoV-2 in a large community surveillance study. Nature 626, 1094–1101 (2024). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07029-4
Ghafari M et al. Purifying Selection Determines the Short-Term Time Dependency of Evolutionary Rates in SARS-CoV-2 and pH1N1 Influenza. Molecular Biology and Evolution 39, msac009 (2022). doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msac009
Ghafari M et al. A mechanistic evolutionary model explains the time-dependent pattern of substitution rates in viruses. Current Biology 31, 4689-4696.e5 (2021). doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.08.020
Markov P et al. The evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Reviews Microbiology 21, 361-379 (2023). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-023-00878-2
Ghafari M et al. Investigating the evolutionary origins of the first three SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. Frontiers in Virology 2, 2555 (2022). doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fviro.2022.942555
Positions
- Kemp Junior Research Fellow
- Wellcome Trust Early Career Research Fellow, Department of Biology