Art Poon

Art Poon is an Associate Professor at Western University, specializing in bioinformatics and molecular epidemiology. His research focuses on reconstructing virus spread and adaptation using genomic data, with a particular emphasis on HIV and SARS-CoV-2. He holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and completed a postdoc at the UCSD Center for AIDS Research. Poon leads the Poon Lab, developing computational tools for evolutionary analysis and open-source software for high-performance computing.

Education: PhD in Biology (UC San Diego), MSc in Zoology (UBC), Postdoctoral training in HIV genomics. His work bridges mathematical modeling, phylogenetics, and machine learning to address public health challenges.

Research Interests: Virus evolution, phylodynamics, and the application of network science to epidemiological data. His lab’s tools, like HexSE and CoVizu, enable real-time genomic epidemiology and wastewater-based surveillance.

Key Contributions: Developed methods for HIV transmission cluster detection and SARS-CoV-2 variant tracking in wastewater. His work appears in journals like PLoS Computational Biology and Molecular Biology and Evolution.