Joining PETAL

We are always eager to hear from curious, collaborative scientists who share our commitment to pandemic preparedness.
Below you’ll find the best routes into the lab:

Prospective PhD Students

We welcome graduate students from a number of different UC Berkeley Graduate Programs. Currently, these include:

Infectious Diseases and Immunity

Computational Biology

Computational Precision Health

Feel free to reach out (cwhittaker@berkeley.edu) to discuss prospective grad school applications – I’m always happy to chat and discuss the research we’re doing, which grad school programs might make sense for you etc. When you do, please send over a copy of your CV, description of your research interests, as well as any recent work from the lab that you found particularly exciting.

Prospective PhD students PETAL Pandemic & Epidemic Threat Analysis Lab

Prospective Postdocs

General Application

We invite expressions of interest from researchers with backgrounds in infectious disease epidemiology, pathogen genomics, computational modelling, ecology, applied mathematics, statistics and related fields. For consideration, please send the following to Charlie Whittaker (cwhittaker@berkeley.edu):

CV, including a list of publications

Cover letter describing your research interests and motivations for joining our lab

(Optional) Links to up to two of your most significant papers (or those most relevant to the work we do at PETAL)

Specific Positions

We’ll post specific positions here as we advertise them. At the moment, we don’t currently have any openings.

There is no single “ideal” profile, and we welcome a diversity of backgrounds; what matters most is your ability to work with data, some familiarity with public health and infectious disease-related questions, and your enthusiasm for PETAL’s mission to use analytical tools in service of pandemic preparedness.