Trevor Bedford is an American computational virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. His research focuses on tools to speed the process of using genomic sequencing data to map the evolutionary trees of pathogens -- and thus yield insights into geographic spread, epidemic growth rate, and vaccine efficacy. Starting with an early system called Nextflu in 2015, Bedford and Richard Neher co-developed Nextstrain, an open source system for computing viral evolutionary trees from sequencing data. In 2020, Bedford was able to use data from the Flu Tracking Project and Nextstrain to first document community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States.
In 2021, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Bedfords work, naming him a 2021 MacArthur fellow.
Bedford graduated with a BA in Biological Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2002 and obtained a Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University in 2008.
In 2020, he posted on Twitter about the first known community transmission of COVID-19 in the United States. That action was later cited as one of the actions that helped galvanize a rapid response to Covid on a national scale.
In September 2021, he received a 7-year $9 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Later that same month, he was named as part of that year's MacArthur Fellows Program class.