Charles Chiu, MD, PhD

I am an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist and lead a translational research laboratory focusing on (i) metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) assay development for infectious disease diagnostics, (ii) discovery and characterization of emerging viral pathogens, and (iii) development of new bioinformatic tools and cutting-edge genomic technologies for clinical and public health applications. Current projects in my laboratory include (i) pathogen discovery in tickborne infections, acute febrile illness, and blood screening, (ii) investigating links between enterovirus infection and acute flaccid myelitis, and (iii) cell culture, human, and animal studies of Zika virus infection in acutely infected patients and pregnant women. We are also actively leveraging nanopore sequencing for diagnosis and surveillance of febrile illnesses in remote locations, including point-of-care outbreak settings and aboard the International Space Station, and developing bioinformatic pipelines for pathogen identification and host response characterization. Finally, we are investigating the use of machine-learning based methods for generation of models that can predict the cause of infection on the basis of RNA-Seq transcriptomic data.