Finding Answers
For evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Townsend ‘90, data holds the key to understanding disease.
BY KRISTIN DUISBERG
Biostatistician and evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Townsend ’90 has changed our understanding of risks around COVID-19, the Ebola virus and even the bubonic plague, and his work on tumor mutations is helping to revolutionize the treatment of many cancers. But catch him in his office at the Yale School of Public Health on any given morning and you might as easily get him talking about his achievements on the Masters running circuit as his scientific discoveries. In March, the former Division I runner earned a gold medal and two silvers at the National Masters Indoor Championships in Chicago, eight months after bringing home a silver at the National Outdoor Championship. “Both times, I’ve looked around and thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m so outclassed by these people. … Oh well, I’ll just do my best,’” Townsend says. “And then I’ve gotten medals and I’m just like, ‘How did that happen?’”
In the question, Townsend reveals his professional training as much as his athletic modesty; in analyzing health data in novel ways that help shed light on diseases and their spread on both individual and population levels, his work very much an exploration of “how did that happen?” His mathematical modeling of the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak helped public health officials in West Africa understand who was transmitting the disease and how frequently; in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, his was the work proving that individuals who were exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus could safely leave isolation after seven days and not the 14 originally recommended by the Centers for Disease Control if they tested negative at that point.
In terms of his research, Townsend says, “I constantly look at what’s going on around me, and when I see something I feel is not being done the right way or the right question isn’t being asked, I dive in and do that question” — a process that involves modeling massive amounts of often disparate historical data to predict how a virus or a genetic mutation will behave. In cancer, his work involves quantifying the relative importance of various genetic variants that have been sequenced in established tumors, and this critical information is helping oncologists more precisely target gene therapies that can arrest the proliferation of the disease.
Ironically, Townsend, who grew up on a farm in Caanan, New Hampshire, and came to St. Paul’s School as a Fourth Former, never took biology in high school. “This is going to sound silly, but I had a really good biology course in seventh grade, and when I got to St. Paul’s, I was focused on the quantitative sciences, where there’s more of a linear pro- gression to what you’re learning than in the life sciences, where one course isn’t necessarily built off another, and so I took a lot of chemistry and physics as well as math,” he explains.
At Brown University, he brought that quantitative background to bear on his study of biology — and the three years of training he’d done under SPS cross country coach Chip Morgan to the Brown cross country team. “He was an amazing coach,” Townsend says of Morgan, describing the in-depth strategic analyses the longtime Latin, Greek and English teacher and crew coach would share with his runners before every race. “It was such a rigorous approach.” A walk-on at Brown, Townsend ultimately earned a scoring spot on the varsity squad, and established the dual identities of serious athlete and serious scientist that he maintained through data-heavy doctoral work in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard and post-doctoral work at the University of California-Berkeley and to faculty positions first at the University of Connecticut and now at Yale, where he is the inaugural Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.
While many describe the field of evolutionary biology as inevitably backward looking, that’s another duality that Townsend is quick to embrace. “Evolutionary biology historically has been viewed as this thing that you look back and figure out what happened when, as a sort of intellectual curiosity,” he says. “But in fact, it’s really important for a lot of the major questions we’re addressing in the world today, and I’ve been trying to show how that’s true. I could never have made … those predictions of [COVID] immunity without looking back at evolutionary biology; I couldn’t do any of the cancer stuff I’ve done without looking back at the evolution of the many tumors that people have already had.”
Diving deep into the scientific past to draw robust maps of the future — it’s the perfect puzzle for an academic whose mind is always moving even faster than his legs.