Trevor Bedford

Seattle might have experienced a very different (and far worse) COVID-19 outbreak without Bedford, a computational biologist and associate professor at the city’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Bedford, with his more than 250,000 Twitter followers, is one of the most closely watched pandemic analysts anywhere, but his work tracking the virus—and, critically, calling attention to its spread—in the early days of the outbreak was especially noticed in his hometown, where his research was widely shared among the high-powered, well-networked government, business, and health leaders in the community, galvanizing a unified response. Bedford has also analyzed the genomic evolution of COVID-19 on Nextstrain.org, an open-source platform he helped create years ago to study the evolution of pathogens. And he continues to be a passionate advocate—and a compelling model—for doing science collaboratively and transparently. There couldn’t be a better time for that.