
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.
See the website at OSU for short biographies of the speakers.
Upcoming Talk
11 February 2026 | 4 pm CET
Dr. Jonas Fuchs (University Hospital Freiburg, Germany)
How viral evolution is shaped during long-term infections of immune-compromised hosts
Short-Bio:
Jonas Fuchs is a junior group leader at the Institute of Virology, Freiburg University Medical Center (Germany), where he works in clinical virus genomics. He was trained in molecular virology and took an deep-dive into bioinformatics during the COVID-19 pandemic. His research focuses on intra-host viral evolution in immunocompromised patients to study viral diversification, immune escape, and therapy-driven selection. Recently, he developed varVAMP, a software to design tiled amplicon schemes for sequencing highly variable viruses and continues to establish sequencing schemes for different viruses. At the moment his research focuses on antiviral resistances in Herpes simplex virus 1 and long-term infections of hepatitis E patients.
Links:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63681-y
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-60175-9>
https://github.com/jonas-fuchs
Schedule
| 8 April 2026 | Pascal Mutz National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA | Illuminating covalently closed circular RNAs from metatranscriptomics: from Obelisks to novel entities |
| 11 March 2026 | (TBA) | (TBA) |
| 11 February 2026 | Jonas Fuchs University Hospital Freiburg, Germany | How viral evolution is shaped during long-term infections of immune-compromised hosts |
| 14 January 2026 | Kay Bidle Rutgers University, New Jersey, United States | Ocean physics, phytoplankton-virus interactions and the carbon cycle: implications for aggregation and export |
| 10 December 2025 | Antônio Pedro Camargo University of São Paulo, Brazil | Drawing from phage diversity to uncover genomic factors shaping host interaction |
| 12 November 2025 | Amir Fromm Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel | Untangle the complexity of the virosphere using single-cell RNA-sequencing |
| 8 October 2025 | Kieran Lamb University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK | Characterising novel viral proteins using protein language models (PLMs) |
| 10 September 2025 | Luis Bolaños Avellaneda Exeter University, UK | Chronotyping the Ocean Virome: Fine-Scale Temporal Clustering Reveals Viral Ecological and Evolutionary Patterns |
| 11 June 2025 | Ben Bolduc Sullivan & Rich Labs, Ohio State University | vConTACT3: Virus Classification of Old and New |
| 09 April 2025 | Marcel Ribeiro-Dantas Seqera & Potiguar University, Brazil | Nextflow pipelines: Connecting Data to Discoveries |
| 12 March 2025 | Manuel Martinez-Garcia University of Alicante | Unveiling the Hidden World of a Ubiquitous Marine Virus |
| 12 February 2025 | Mike Tisza Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, USA | Wastewater virome sequencing uncovers pathogen transmission and evolution |
| 14 August 2024 | Louis Du Plessis ETH Zürich, Switzerland | Insights into infectious disease dynamics across time and space with phylogenetics and phylodynamics |
| 10 April 2024 | Antonio Bandoo ASU School of Life Sciences, Arizona, US | Two novel geminiviruses identified from bees (Apis mellifera and Nomia sp.) |
| 13 March 2024 | Paula Istvan University of Oslo, Norway | Gut Phages – Guardians of Gut-laxy |
| 14 February 2024 | JL 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 2023 | Luke 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 2023 | Mark Paul Selda Rivarez North Carolina State University, USA / Caraga State University, Philippines | Into the wild and digital: Virus hunting beyond the traditional |
| 13 September 2023 | Sofia Medvedeva Institut Pasteur, France | A global virome of methanogenic archaea highlights novel diversity and adaptations to the gut environment |
| 12 July 2023 | Tom van der Most Radboud University Medical Center, Netherlands | Characterising the virome of Culex mosquitoes |
| 14 June 2023 | Erin Harvey The University of Sydney, Australia | The utility of phylogeny in virus discovery: Host association, taxonomy and disease potential |
| 10 May 2023 | Jeroen Meijer Utrecht University, Netherlands | Eco-evolutionary dynamics of massive, parallel bacteriophage outbreaks in compost communities |
| 05 April 2023 | Ruonan Wu Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA | Unearthing Climate Impacts on Soil Viruses |
| 08 March 2023 | Mohammadali Khan Mirzaei Helmholtz Munich, Munich, Germany | Interrogating the virome-microbiome interactions to mitigate dysbiosis-associated diseases |
| 11 January 2023 | Cormac M. Kinsella Amsterdam UMC, The Netherlands | Computational host discovery for stray viruses in the metagenomic age |
| 14 December 2022 | Justine Charon Sydney, Australia | Investigating the protist virosphere: the current limits and how we can face them? |
| 9 November 2022 | René Kallies UFZ Leipzig, Germany | Introduction to MuDoGeR |
| 12 October 2022 | Uri Neri Moshav Yarkona, Israel | RNA viruses in metatranscriptions – dawn of a new age? |
| 14 September 2022 | Daan Jansen KU Leuven, Belgium | Community typing as a way to explore virome compositional changes in IBD patients |
| 10 August 2022 | Elaine Luo Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, United States | Viral diversity in the ocean |
| 13 July 2022 | Janina Rahlff Linneaus University, Sweden | Dwelling in the ocean’s skin: lessons learned from studying viruses at the air-sea boundary |
| 8 June 2022 | Ahmed Zayed Ohio State University, United States | Ecology and evolutionary origins of the Global Ocean RNA virome |
| 3 April 2022 | Rotem Sorek Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel | The immune system of bacteria: Beyond CRISPR |
| 9 March 2022 | Florian Pfaff Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute, Germany | Virus discovery now and then – from Koch’s postulate to browsing viruses in the internet |
| 9 February 2022 | Ann Gregory Ohio State University, United States | Growing opportunities for studying microdiversity in viral ecology |
