Department of Preventive Medicine Biostatistics Seminar Series: Real Time Pathogen Surveillance

The Division of Biostatistics of the Department of Preventive Medicine, UTHSC, invites you to attend the following seminar.

Time: Monday, September 15, 2025, 2:00PM - 3:00PM CT

ZOOM Virtual Room Connection: Register in advance for this meeting to get the Zoom Link

Seminar Website: https://www.uthsc.edu/preventive-medicine/events.php

Speaker Bio: https://uams-triprofiles.uams.edu/profiles/display/3642362

Real Time Pathogen Surveillance: Translational Bioinformatics, Data Science, Biostatistics

Se-Ran Jun, Ph.D.

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

Real-time pathogen surveillance is truly a transdisciplinary research area, combining microbiology, translational bioinformatics, data science, epidemiology, EHR, and some more. We are utilizing whole genome sequencing data as an epidemiology tool that provides detailed information about pathogens, and further data-rich understanding of antibiotic resistance and virulence factors. Integration of genomic data into routine clinical practice offers new and promising opportunities to significantly improve patient outcomes, thus making hospitals safer. Success of this depends on key requirements: fast enough turnaround time, high discriminatory power, and high accuracy to impact antibiotic stewardship decision, to assist in breaking transmission routes, and to improve interventions made by infection prevention teams. Using clinical isolates of Enterococcus faecium, a pathogen of high clinical consequence collected from patients at UAMS, we have demonstrated early success of our real-time genomic surveillance through a proof-of-concept model in supporting antibiotic stewardship. Further, our study underscores the importance and the benefits of integrating genomic data with EHR data for infection prevention and control.