Event Calendar » ECR Viromics Webinar Series

This webinar series is aimed at early career researchers studying viruses in complex communities. We open up a platform to present and discuss your research and get connected.

The ECR Viromics Webinar Series is jointly hosted by the Center of Microbiome Science at Ohio State University, the EVBC, and the NSF EMERGE Biology Integration Institute.

The webinars will take place regularly on the second Wednesday of the month at 4 pm CET/CEST | 10 am EST/EDT | 7 am PST/PDT.

The webinars take place online via Zoom – Use the registration button below to receive the login details (registration is possible until 1 day before the start of the event). Registration is only necessary once, you will then receive updates about all upcoming speakers (you can unsubscribe at any time). Recordings of some lectures are available upon request. If you want a lecture to be recorded, please contact us beforehand.

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See the website at OSU for further info.

Upcoming Talk

8 April 2026 | 4 pm CET
Pascal Mutz (National Institutes of Health, United States)
Illuminating covalently closed circular RNAs from metatranscriptomics: from Obelisks to novel entities

Short-Bio:
Pascal Mutz is currently a Postdoc in the group of Eugene Koonin at the NIH. He works on various aspects of virus evolution and the discovery and characterization of new viruses. Pascal received his training in molecular biology and was studying the interaction of different viruses with the innate immune system during his diploma and PhD thesis at the Universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg (Germany), respectively. Afterwards, he started to apply bioinformatics to study virus evolution and to characterize novel viruses and their proteins. In his most recent studies, Pascal investigates covalently closed circular (ccc)RNAs mined from metatranscriptomes to identify novel, non-cellular entities including Obelisks.

Link:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.03.673927v1

Schedule

10 June 2026TBA
TBA
8 April 2026Pascal Mutz
National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA		Illuminating covalently closed circular RNAs from metatranscriptomics: from Obelisks to novel entities
11 March 2026James Kosmopoulos
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA		Scalable annotation and curation of auxiliary viral genes with CheckAMG
11 February 2026Jonas Fuchs
University Hospital Freiburg, Germany		How viral evolution is shaped during long-term infections of immune-compromised hosts
14 January 2026Kay Bidle
Rutgers University, New Jersey, United States		Ocean physics, phytoplankton-virus interactions and the carbon cycle: implications for aggregation and export
10 December 2025Antônio Pedro Camargo
University of São Paulo, Brazil		Drawing from phage diversity to uncover genomic factors shaping host interaction
12 November 2025Amir Fromm
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel		Untangle the complexity of the virosphere using single-cell RNA-sequencing
8 October 2025Kieran Lamb
University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK		Characterising novel viral proteins using protein language models (PLMs)
10 September 2025Luis Bolaños Avellaneda
Exeter University, UK		Chronotyping the Ocean Virome: Fine-Scale Temporal Clustering Reveals Viral Ecological and Evolutionary Patterns
11 June 2025Ben Bolduc
Sullivan & Rich Labs, Ohio State University		vConTACT3: Virus Classification of Old and New
09 April 2025Marcel Ribeiro-Dantas
Seqera & Potiguar University, Brazil		Nextflow pipelines: Connecting Data to Discoveries
12 March 2025Manuel Martinez-Garcia
University of Alicante		Unveiling the Hidden World of a Ubiquitous Marine Virus
12 February 2025Mike Tisza
Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, USA		Wastewater virome sequencing uncovers pathogen transmission and evolution
14 August 2024Louis Du Plessis
ETH Zürich, Switzerland		Insights into infectious disease dynamics across time and space with phylogenetics and phylodynamics
10 April 2024Antonio Bandoo
ASU School of Life Sciences, Arizona, US		Two novel geminiviruses identified from bees (Apis mellifera and Nomia sp.)
13 March 2024Paula Istvan
University of Oslo, Norway		Gut Phages – Guardians of Gut-laxy
14 February 2024JL Weissman
The City College of New York, New York, US		What Microbes Do When They Get Sick: Eco-Evolutionary Drivers of Antiviral Defense Strategy
13 December 2023Luke Hillary
University of California, Davis, US		From lab to landscape: adapting RNA and DNA viromics to expand our understanding of the anthropogenic virosphere
08 November 2023Mark Paul Selda Rivarez
North Carolina State University, USA / Caraga State University, Philippines		Into the wild and digital: Virus hunting beyond the traditional
13 September 2023Sofia Medvedeva
Institut Pasteur, France		A global virome of methanogenic archaea highlights novel diversity and adaptations to the gut environment
12 July 2023Tom van der Most
Radboud University Medical Center, Netherlands		Characterising the virome of Culex mosquitoes
14 June 2023Erin Harvey
The University of Sydney, Australia		The utility of phylogeny in virus discovery: Host association, taxonomy and disease potential
10 May 2023Jeroen Meijer
Utrecht University, Netherlands		Eco-evolutionary dynamics of massive, parallel bacteriophage outbreaks in compost communities
05 April 2023Ruonan Wu
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA		Unearthing Climate Impacts on Soil Viruses
08 March 2023Mohammadali Khan Mirzaei
Helmholtz Munich, Munich, Germany		Interrogating the virome-microbiome interactions to mitigate dysbiosis-associated diseases
11 January 2023Cormac M. Kinsella
Amsterdam UMC, The Netherlands		Computational host discovery for stray viruses in the metagenomic age
14 December 2022Justine Charon
Sydney, Australia		Investigating the protist virosphere: the current limits and how we can face them?
9 November 2022René Kallies
UFZ Leipzig, Germany		Introduction to MuDoGeR
12 October 2022Uri Neri
Moshav Yarkona, Israel		RNA viruses in metatranscriptions – dawn of a new age?
14 September 2022Daan Jansen
KU Leuven, Belgium		Community typing as a way to explore virome compositional changes in IBD patients
10 August 2022Elaine Luo
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, United States		Viral diversity in the ocean
13 July 2022Janina Rahlff
Linneaus University, Sweden		Dwelling in the ocean’s skin: lessons learned from studying viruses at the air-sea boundary
8 June 2022Ahmed Zayed
Ohio State University, United States		Ecology and evolutionary origins of the Global Ocean RNA virome
3 April 2022Rotem Sorek
Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel		The immune system of bacteria: Beyond CRISPR
9 March 2022Florian Pfaff
Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute, Germany		Virus discovery now and then – from Koch’s postulate to browsing viruses in the internet
9 February 2022Ann Gregory
Ohio State University, United States		Growing opportunities for studying microdiversity in viral ecology