Dr Rebecca Garten Kondor

Rebecca Garten Kondor serves as the lead of the Genomic Analysis Team within the Influenza Division’s Virology, Surveillance and Diagnosis Branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr Kondor is the Deputy Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Surveillance, Epidemiology and Control of Influenza at CDC and serves as a technical advisor for the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System. She also leads the Bioinformatics Unit in the Strain Surveillance and Emerging Variants Team within the CDC’s COVID-19 Laboratory Task Force. 

Dr Kondor received an undergraduate degree in biological sciences from Goucher College, Towson, MD and a PhD in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA. She completed her postdoctoral studies as a CDC/APHL Emerging Infectious Disease Fellow, where she began her research on the genomic evolution of influenza. 

Since joining CDC in 2004, Dr Kondor has focused her efforts on expanding informatics and bioinformatics infrastructure and improving genomic analysis pipelines. Her research and public health activities focus on evidence-based analytic analysis for the selection of vaccine candidates which best represent the current and future viral evolution. This is accomplished through a multidisciplinary approach of genetics, bioinformatics, virology, molecular biology and epidemiology. Her team’s creation and maintenance of molecular surveillance analysis pipelines for seasonal influenza virus genomic evolution which integrate data from antigenicity, antiviral susceptibility, attenuation, host-specificity, pathogenicity and diagnostics are critical to our public health mission. Similar strategies are being applied to studies of SARS-CoV-2 evolution. Her team actively participates in building laboratory sequence analysis capabilities worldwide by offering training and technical expertise, providing reference materials, and additional support. She has established productive collaborations with partners within the CDC as well as in academia, industry, and governmental agencies.