Dr Yu Xiaoyu completed his Bachelors of Science in Actuarial and Financial Mathematics at the University of Pretoria South Africa and received a Masters and PhD in Bioformatics under the supervision of Professor Oleg Reva in 2018. His PhD thesis involves using non-alignment methods in performing phylogenetic cladding of different bacteria using oligonucleotide signatures. He later joined Professor Andrew Rambaut in 2019 at the University of Edinburgh as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant in charge of the PANGEA-HIV 2 project looking to identify individual and population level factors that drive the epidemic using HIV-1 phylogenetic data. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, sequence processing and phylogenetic analysis work was done in collaboration with the Botswana Harvard Partnership and Cog-UK Consortium.

His current research at the Centre for Influenza Research of the University of Hong Kong involves using phylogenetic methods to identify key markers within different clades of H5N1 connected to host-interaction, viral fitness and pathogenicity.

1. YU, X. 2023. Genofunc: genome annotation and identification of genome features for automated pipelining analysis of virus whole genome sequences. BMC Bioinformatics, 24, 218.
2. YU X, REVA ON. SWPhylo – A Novel Tool for Phylogenomic Inferences by Comparison of Oligonucleotide Patterns and Integration of Genome-Based and Gene-Based Phylogenetic Trees. Evolutionary Bioinformatics. 2018;14. doi:10.1177/1176934318759299
3. COLQUHOUN, R., O’TOOLE, Á., HILL, V., MCCRONE, J. T., YU, X., NICHOLLS, S. M., POPLAWSKI, R., WHALLEY, T., GROVES, N., ELLABY, N., LOMAN, N., CONNOR, T. & RAMBAUT, A. 2024. A phylogenetics and variant calling pipeline to support SARS-CoV-2 genomic epidemiology in the UK. Virus Evolution, 10.
4. CHOGA, W. T., GOBE, I., SERU, K., MARUAPULA, D., NDLOVU, N. S., ZUZE, B. J. L., MOTSHOSI, P., MATSURU, T., SABONE, P., YU, X., BLACKARD, J. T., SAN, J. E., MAKHEMA, J., GASEITSIWE, S. & MOYO, S. 2024. Genomic epidemiology and immune escape of SARS-CoV-2 recombinant strains circulating in Botswana. IJID Regions, 100484.