COVID-19 Genomic Epidemiology Toolkit Developer: Krisandra Allen, MPH, MB(ASCP)CM

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Krisandra Allen

Molecular Epidemiologist

Office of Communicable Disease Epidemiology
Washington State Department of Health

Krisandra Allen, MPH, participated in initial discussions with the toolkit development team to provide feedback on training needs from the epidemiology perspective. She is the creator and presenter of module 3.4, showing how to navigate through Nextstrain phylogenetic trees.

Ms. Allen is a molecular epidemiologist in the Office of Communicable Disease Epidemiology at the Washington State Department of Health; in this role, she serves as the lead point of contact in Washington state for genomic epidemiology data analysis interpretation.

As an epidemiologist, she has worked with genomic data investigating outbreaks of foodborne disease-causing pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella. In the laboratory, she has worked with noroviruses and enteroviruses. She enjoys exploring new tools to make genomic data accessible to epidemiologists and helping strengthen the collaborations between epidemiologists and laboratorians.

Krisandra Allen completed her B.S. in Microbiology at the University of Idaho and her MPH in Epidemiology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“Successful collaborations between epidemiologists, bioinformaticians, and laboratory scientists multiply the productivity of each discipline. Adding epidemiologic and clinical data to genomic data allows for critical questions to be answered which could not be addressed by looking at siloed data. Resources such as the COVID-19 Genomic Epidemiology Toolkit address a critical need for training to help epidemiologists become more confident in contributing to genomic epidemiology investigations.”