Andrea Olmstead

Andrea obtained her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology where she researched host-targeted methods for blocking Hepatitis C virus infection. During her PhD, Andrea spent several years as a teaching assistant for MICB 406 (Topics in Molecular Virology) where she helped evaluate dozens of articles written by undergraduates and is excited to support publication of these research papers in JEMI-Pearls.

Andrea is currently a research scientist at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS where she applies next-generation sequencing-based strategies to enhance surveillance and diagnosis of viral infections. This includes examining the role of Hepatitis C virus diversity in treatment response, characterizing infections with unknown aetiologies, and investigating co-infections in people living with HIV. Prior, Andrea was a post-doctoral researcher at the BC Centre for Disease Control where she developed strategies for measuring Hepatitis C virus diversity and infection duration, and for looking at virus transmission clusters using sequencing and phylogenetics.