Noemi Polo

Noemi is a Research Technician in the Immunogenetics group and the Sequencing facility at The Pirbright Institute. She is in of charge library preparation for NGS on Illumina platforms and is responsible for single cell sequencing in high containment. Her primary interests include, developing diagnostic tools for viral disease detection and surveillance, outbreak response, and understanding viral epidemiology.

Before joining The Pirbright Institute, Noemi worked for PAHO/WHO’s Health Emergencies programme for three years, responding to various emergencies as part of the Emergency Operations Centre in the region of the Americas. Most recently, she was part of the PAHO/WHOs COVID-19 Incident Management Team supporting country preparedness and outbreak response efforts, and was previously deployed to the Bahamas to support the Ministry of Health after Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

Prior to that, she worked for the Virology and Molecular Diagnostic units at Texas A&M Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory in College Station, Texas, with AAVLD accreditation, supporting animal health and surveillance testing for high-consequence agricultural and zoonotic pathogens.

Noemi earned a BS in Molecular and Cell Biology from Texas A&M University and an MS in Public Health Microbiology and Emerging Infectious Diseases at the George Washington University. During her studies she helped characterize the genetic variability for drug resistant mutations in the HIV virus genome as part of an epidemiological study in Washington D.C., and as part of her MS dissertation, assessed the distribution of leptospirosis serogroups in humans and animals using a One Health Approach in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.