Joseph Fauver, PI

I joined the Faculty at UNMC in the Fall of 2021. Originally from Springfield, Nebraska, I began my research career as an undergraduate at Peru State College under the mentorship of Dr. Rich Clopton working on the taxonomy of gregarines infecting cockroaches. My time as an undergraduate researcher sparked my interest in field work, parasitology, and entomology, and I decided to a pursue a Ph.D. in medical entomology and arbovirology with Dr. Greg Ebel at Colorado State University. During my time in the Ebel lab I worked on a variety of projects focused on West Nile virus surveillance, Zika virus, and Xenosurveillance, a novel approach to detect human pathogens in mosquito blood meals using Next-Generation Sequencing. I moved on to a postdoc at WashU in St. Louis and worked as a part of the DOLF Project with Dr. Gary Weil and Dr. Peter Fischer focused on improving mass drug administration for lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis. While at WashU, I developed an approach to generate de novo genome assemblies of human filarial worms using the Oxford Nanopore MinION. Finally, prior to starting at UNMC, I spent ~2.5 years working with Dr. Nathan Grubaugh at the Yale School of Public Health responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by building a large-scale SARS-CoV-2 genomic surveillance program in Connecticut, among other things.

I am broadly interested in how we can use pathogen genomics to better understand infectious disease transmission. Our goal in the Fauver Lab is to incorporate pathogen genomic tools into routine public health practice at both the local and global scale.