Featured Speaker: Javier Arsuaga, Departments of Mathematics and Molecular & Cellular Biology, UC Davis

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the importance of developing models that can predict whether a (non-human) animal virus can spill over to humans and how a virus will evolve once it is spreading among humans. In coronaviruses a key step in the infection process is the binding of the viral spike (S) protein to the human receptor. In this talk, I will present mathematical and machine learning models that use the sequence and structure of the S protein to predict the spread of coronaviruses.