The Park Lab at Seoul National University works at the interface of epidemiology and ecology. We utilize mathematical and statistical models to infer mechanisms driving the spread of infectious diseases and to predict future outbreaks. We also aim to link ecological theory with infectious disease dynamics to answer broader questions about population biology.

2025.09 - now  Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences, Seoul, Korea  

2024.07 - 2025.08  Postdoctoral Researcher and Life Sciences Research Foundation fellow, University of Chicago, IL, USA 

2029 - 2024  Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA 

2014-2019  BSc in Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada 

Understanding what mechanisms determine species coexistence is a fundamental aim in community ecology. Analogously, we can ask how the host immune response shape competition between related pathogens strains and facilitate their coexistence at the population level. We are interested in studying infectious disease dynamics from the perspective of community ecology, where we aim to characterize the dynamics of a pathogen community as a whole, rather than focusing on individual pathogens. These efforts will allow us to predict future emergence and re-emergence opportunities.

There is increasing evidence that climate factors play critical roles in determining how well diseasese transmit. In some cases, such as the RSV epidemic in Japan, interplay between climate-driven transmission and changes in population-level immunity can lead to complex outbreak patterns. We seek to understand the relationship between climate and disease transmission, and further leverage these findings to predict the dynamics of pathogen communities in future climate.

Traditional pathogen surveillance systems, such as symptom-based testing, only captures a small fraction of total infections and therefore provides limited information about the underlying disease transmission. This limitation can cause large uncertainties in our inferences and predictions about epidemic dynamics. Recently, we showed that integrating even a small amount of serological data can considerably improve our ability to predict future outbreaks of Enterovirus D68. Our goal is to further extend these approaches for antigenically variable pathogens, allowing integration of both serological and genomic data to predict pathogen evolution.

Pillai A.N., Park S.W., Lipsitch M., Cowling B.J., Cobey S., 2026. Heterogeneity in pre-vaccination population immunity can contribute to variability in vaccine effectiveness estimates. medRxiv.

Park, S.W., 2026. Strategic coexistence theory for evolutionary games. bioRxiv.

Park, S.W., Levine, J. and Grenfell, B., 2026. Unifying coexistence theory for ecological communities and pathogen strain competition. bioRxiv.

Benhamou, W., Howerton, E., Park, S.W., Viboud, C., Metcalf, C.J.E. and Grenfell, B.T., 2026. Leveraging perturbations to infer the population dynamics of human rhinovirus and interaction of influenza A virus. medRxiv.

Park, S.W., 2026. Delayed introduction and susceptible variation explain spatial asynchrony during the large pertussis outbreak in Korea. medRxiv.

Shin, C.Y., Park, S.W., Viboud, C., Sabeti, P.C., Fraser, C. and Sun, K., 2025. Transmission Waiting Time: A Unifying Metric for Outbreak Controllability. medRxiv.

Park, S.W., Nielsen, B.F., Howerton, E., Grenfell, B.T. and Cobey, S., 2026. Susceptible host dynamics explain pathogen resilience to perturbations. PNAS, 123(1), e2517518122.

Nielsen, B.F., Park, S.W., Howerton, E., Lorentzen, O.F., Jensen, M.H., and Grenfell, B.T., 2025. Complex multiannual cycles of Mycoplasma pneumoniae: persistence and the role of stochasticity.. PNAS, 122(52), e2509184122.

Park, S.W., Holmdahl, I., Howerton, E., Yang. W., Baker, R.E., Vecchi, G.A., Cobey, S., Metcalf, C.J.E., and Grenfell, B.T., 2025. Interplay between climate and childhood mixing can explain a sudden shift in RSV seasonality in Japan. Nature Communications. 16, 11385.

Nguyen-Tran, H.^§, Park, S.W.^§, Vogt, M.R.^§, Permaul, P.^§, Spaulding, A.B., Hernandez, M.L., Bohl, J.A., Godbole, S., Ruckwardt, T.J., Krug, P.W., Moss, D.L., Derrien-Colemyn, A., Chowdhury, A., Dziubla, G., Wang, L., Castro, M., Narpala, S.R., Longtine, E.R., Henry, A.R., Ngo, T.-T.B., Dzantiev, L., Sigal, G.B., Metcalf, C.J.E., Kimberlin, D.W., Dominguez, S.R., Mittelman, A., McDermott, A.B., Serebryannyy, L.A., Grenfell, B., Messacar, K., and Douek, D.C., 2025. Dynamics of endemic virus re-emergence in children in the USA following the COVID-19 pandemic (2022–23): a prospective, multicentre, longitudinal, immunoepidemiological surveillance study. Lancet Infectious Diseases.
 ^§Contributed equally.

Howerton, E., Williams, T.C., Casalegno, J.-S., Dominguez, S., Gunson, R., Messacar, K., Metcalf, C.J.E., Park, S.W., Viboud, C., and Grenfell, B.T., 2025. Using COVID-19 pandemic perturbation to model RSV-hMPV interactions and potential implications under RSV interventions. Nature Communications 16(1), 7261.

Park, S.W., Noble, B., Howerton, E., Nielsen, B.F., Lentz, S., Ambroggio, L., Dominguez, S., Messacar, K., and Grenfell, B.T., 2024. Predicting the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 on Mycoplasma pneumoniae in the United States. Epidemics 49, 100808.

Charniga, K., Park, S.W., Akhmetzhanov, A.R., Cori, A., Dushoff, J., Funk, S., Gostic, K.M., Linton, N.M., Lison, A., Overton, C.E., Pulliam, J.R.C., Ward, T., Cauchemez, S., and Abbott, S., 2024. Best practices for estimating and reporting epidemiological delay distributions of infectious diseases using public health surveillance and healthcare data. PLoS Computational Biology, 20 (10) e1012520.

Park, S.W., Lawal, T., Marin, M., Marlow, M.A., Grenfell, B.T., Masters, N.B., 2024. Modeling the population-level impact of a third dose of MMR vaccine on a mumps outbreak at the University of Iowa. PNAS, 121 (43) e2403808121. Press coverage by Nature.

Park, S.W., Cobey, S., Metcalf, C.J.E., Levine, J.M., and Grenfell, B.T., 2024. Predicting pathogen mutual invasibility and co-circulation. Science, 386(6718), 175-179.

Yang, Q., Park, S.W., Saad-Roy, C.M., Ahmad, I., Viboud, C., Arinaminpathy, N., and Grenfell, B.T., 2024. Assessing population-level target product profiles of universal human influenza A vaccines. Epidemics, 48, 100776.

Earn, D.J., Park, S.W., amd Bolker, B.M., 2024. Fitting Epidemic Models to Data: A Tutorial in Memory of Fred Brauer. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 86(9), 1-32.

Holmdahl, I., Bents, S.J., Baker, R.E., Casalegno, J.S., Trovão, N.S., Park, S.W., Metcalf, C.J.E., and Grenfell, B.T., 2024. Differential impact of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions on the epidemiological dynamics of respiratory syncytial virus subtypes A and B. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 14527.

Park, S.W., Messacar, K., Douek, D.C., Spaulding, A.B., Metcalf, C.J.E., and Grenfell, B. T., 2024. Predicting the impact of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical intervention on short-and medium-term dynamics of enterovirus D68 in the US. Epidemics, 46, 100736.

Yang, Q., Wang, B., Lemey, P., Dong, L., Mu, T., Wiebe, R. A., Guo, F., Sequeira Trovao, N., Park, S.W., Lweis, N., Tsui, J.L.-H., Bajaj, S., Cheng, Y., Yang, L., Haba, Y., Li, B., Zhang, G., Pybus, O.G., Tian, H., and Grenfell, B.T., 2024. Synchrony of Bird Migration with Global Dispersal of Avian Influenza Reveals Exposed Bird Orders. Nature Communications, 15(1), 1126.

Park, S.W., Daskalaki, I., Izzo, R., Aranovich, I., te Velthuis, A., Notterman, D., Metcalf, C.J.E., and Grenfell, B.T., 2023. Relative role of community transmission and campus contagion in driving the spread of SARS-CoV-2: lessons from Princeton University. PNAS Nexus, 2(7): pgad201.

Park, S.W., Sun, K., Abbott, S., Sender, R., Bar-On, Y.M., Weitz, J.S., Funk, S., Grenfell, B.T., Backer, J.A., Wallinga, J., Viboud, C., and Dushoff, J., 2023. Inferring the differences in incubation-period and generation-interval distributions of the Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2. PNAS, 120(22), e2221887120.

Park, S.W., Dushoff, J., Grenfell, B.T., and Weitz, J.S., 2023. Intermediate levels of asymptomatic transmission can lead to the highest levels of epidemic fatalities. PNAS Nexus, 2(4): pgad106.

Postdoctoral researcher : 허윤정, 김지선 

Visiting Postdoctoral researcher : 이상보 

PhD Student : 이하령 

Master Student : 강민지 

Undergraduate Student : 이현지, 최시영, 정태양, 원동현, 김영우, 김가은, 송주형, 오승진 

Homepage : https://parklab-snu.github.io/

Contact : sangwoopark@snu.ac.kr