Preparing for a Future Pandemic: Analyzing Emerging Sequence Variations in Avian Influenza
CWSF · 2026 Disease & Illness Bronze Medal
Overview
The H5N1 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), commonly known as Bird Flu, is an urgent threat to global health. This virus is a significant problem, infecting millions of birds and 42 different mammalian species, and causing the deaths of over 300 million birds and at least tens of thousands of wild mammals since 2021, representing one of the largest documented outbreaks in history. Currently, it's a zoonotic disease, only sporadically infecting humans. The urgent question: Is Avian Influenza evolving for human transmission and are we ready for next pandemic? Since 2002, the human mortality rate is ~50%. To address the imminent problem, I'm analyzing mutational changes in the genome sequences of H5N1 HPAI, and using predictive AI in order to forecast new mutations that improve the virus's structural and functional abilities to transmit to humans. This will assist in developing effective pandemic preparedness solutions before widespread human transmission.
Awards (2)
- Bronze Medal
- Selected for CWSF 2026
Competition history
- CWSF 2026
Related projects
ISEF · 2024
Evolving an Epidemic: Optimizing Sialic Acid Receptor Configurations to Increase the Binding Affinity of Avian Influenza H5N1 to Human Cell Glycoproteins
ISEF · 2025
Modeling Bird Flu Mutation Patterns and Cross-Species Transmission Using Sequence Analysis and a Novel Contrastive Learning and Influence-tree Graph Attention Network (CLIGAT)
ISEF · 2016
East Meets West: An Analysis of Avian Influenza in Alaska Interior
ISEF · 2015
Analyzing Hemagglutinin Protein Sequences of H3N2 Influenza Viruses to Predict Antigenic Variants
Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.