Currently, I'm a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Working with Sarah Cobey, I am building models to better understand how factors like vaccination and an individual's infection history affect their susceptibility to influenza infection. This heterogeniety of host immune systems may, in turn, influence the evolution of the influenza virus itself. I hope that the models I'm building will give us a clearer picture of this evolutionary interplay between host and pathogen.

I'm a recent alumni of the Microbiology Graduate Program at MIT. Working with Martin Polz, I used the tools of microbial genomics to better understand how horizontal gene transfer shapes microbial communities.

Prior to my time at MIT, I completed my undergraduate degree at Brown University in Applied Mathematics-Biology and Classics doing work with Jeremy Rich to understand the community composition of anammox bacteria. I've also worked as a research assistant in the lab of Stefan Sievert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution using high throughput sequencing to investigate the microbial communities at hydrothermal vents and oxygen minimum zones.

You can find some of the code I've written on my github.

* indicates equal contribution of authors

Arevalo P.*, VanInsberghe D.*, Elsherbini J., Gore J., Polz M.F. (2019). A reverse ecology approachbased on a biological definition of microbial populations. Cell, 178(4).doi:10.1016/j.cell.2019.06.03

Arevalo P., McLean H.Q., Belongia E.A., Cobey S. (2019). Earliest infections predict the age distribution of seasonal influenza A cases. medRxiv. doi:10.1101/19001875

Chase A.B., Arevalo P., Brodie E.L., Polz M.F., Karaoz U., Martiny J.B.H. (2019). Sympatric and allopatric differentiation delineates population structure in free-living terrestrial bacteria. bioRxiv. doi:10.1101/644468

Polzin J., Arevalo P., Nussbaumer T., Polz M.F, Bright M. (2019). Polyclonal symbiont populations in hydrothermal vent tubeworms and the environment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. doi:10.1098/rspb.2018.1281

Arevalo P., VanInsberghe D., Polz M.F. (2018) A Reverse Ecology Framework for Bacteria and Archaea. In: Population Genomics: Microorganisms. Springer, Cham. doi:10.1007/13836_2018_46

Kauffman, K., Hussain, F., Yang, J., Arevalo, P., Brown, J., Cutler, M., Kelly, L., Polz, M.F. (2018). A major lineage of non-tailed dsDNA viruses as unrecognized killers of marine bacteria. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature25474

Rich J.J., Arevalo P., Chang B.X., Devol A.H., Ward B.B. (2018). Anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) and denitrification in Peru margin sediments. Journal of Marine Systems. doi:10.1016/j.jmarsys.2018.09.007

Burks D.J., Norris, S., Kauffman, K.M., Joy, A., Arevalo, P., Azad, R.K., Wildschutte, H. (2017). Environmental vibrios represent a source of antagonistic compounds that inhibit pathogenic Vibrio cholerae and Vibrio parahaemolyticus strains. MicrobiologyOpen, 6(5). doi:10.1002/mbo3.504

Takemura, A.F., Corzett, C.H., Hussain, F., Arevalo, P., Datta, M., Yu, X., Le Roux, F., Polz, M.F. (2017). Natural resource landscapes of a marine bacterium reveal distinct fitness-determining genes across the genome. Environmental Microbiology, 19:2422–2433. doi:10.1111/1462-2920.13765

Hehemann, J.-H.*, Arevalo, P.*, Datta, M.S.*, Yu, X., Corzett, C., Preheim., S.P., Henschel, A., Timberlake, S., Alm, E.J., Polz, M.F. (2016). Adaptive radiation by waves of gene transfer leads to fine-scale resource partitioning in marine microbes. Nature Communications, 7. Article number: 12860. doi:10.1038/ncomms12860.

Chase, A.B., Arevalo, P., Polz, M.F., Berlemont, R., Martiny, J.B.H. (2016). Evidence for ecological flexibility in the cosmopolitan genus Curtobacterium. Frontiers in Microbiology, 7:1874. doi:10.3389/fmicb.2016.01874