Crystal Hepp Ph.D.

Dr. Crystal Hepp has a background in evolutionary biology and genomics, and her lab focuses heavily on using environmental surveillance of pathogens, especially viruses, to understand their spread over time and space. Her Ph.D. studies were conducted at Arizona State University, where she primarily worked on evolutionary comparisons of Human Immunodeficiency Virus to better characterize spread into the Americas. Her postdoctoral research was conducted at Northern Arizona University, and she was involved in intra-patient studies of Burkholderia pseudomallei, where genomic analyses indicated that an ongoing long-term infection resulted in adaptation of the pathogen to the human host, primarily through gene loss. She joined the NAU faculty body in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems and the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute as an Assistant Professor, and later an Associate Professor with tenure, where her surveillance-based studies were again focused on RNA viruses that can be tracked in the environment for human outbreak mitigation strategies. At TGen North, she continues her work on several projects including West Nile and other arbovirus spread in the southwestern United States and wastewater-based epidemiology.