Jared Evans, PhD

Global Center for Health Security Scholar
Associate Professor
Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology
UNMC College of Medicine

Jared Evans is an Associate Professor in the College of Medicine, Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology and a Scholar of the UNMC Global Center for Health Security. He is also an associated collaborator with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

 Dr. Evans is a virologist with over two decades of experience in basic and applied research in emerging infectious diseases.  He has developed a broad range of research applications and response tools to investigate high-priority virus pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, filoviruses, flaviviruses, and influenza viruses. His research spans molecular characterization to population-level pathogen surveillance of emerging threats, with an emphasis on single-cell assays and novel molecular tools, including microfluidics, biochemical, genomics, and bioinformatics analyses.  Further, he has developed tools and reagents which he has freely shared to conduct diverse research studies, including vaccine development and testing.

 He has pioneered novel solutions to address challenges in government health initiatives. He led multiple DoD-funded projects to characterize virus emergence and evolution using microfluidic droplets. He expanded microfluidic droplet virology to create multiplexed assays to investigate influenza virus neutralization and antigenic characterization with vaccinee sera for the CDC. Dr. Evans was also a principal investigator in the NIH-funded Center for Excellence in Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS) and the subsequent Center for Excellence in Influenza Research and Response (CEIRR). In this work, his team developed next-generation sequencing pipelines for influenza virus and novel open source software that enabled real-time evaluation and visualization of pathogen genomic data. These capabilities were employed in a partnership he led with Johns Hopkins University investigators during the pandemic to characterize the SARS-CoV-2 variants emerging in national capital region.

Dr. Evans has also provided subject matter expertise to a number of initiatives.  He was a member of Johns Hopkins CEIRR Scientific Leadership Group and Scientific Advisory Board for the Johns Hopkins Biocontainment Unit. Dr. Evans is an active member in national networks on research and preparedness involving high consequence pathogens: The National Emerging Special Pathogens Training and Education Consortium (NETEC) and the associated Special Pathogens Research Network (SPRN). He leads a working group to define the state of the science for research in outbreak environments, including medical countermeasures, diagnostics, and safety protocols which resulted in multiple manuscripts.