Assistant Professor of Immunology and Computational & Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh
We are a computational systems immunology lab. Our research focuses on the development and use of novel systems approaches to analyze high-dimensional immunological datasets, and elucidate molecular mechanisms of immunological disorders. Our past work has utilized systems approaches to analyze Mendelian mutations in the context of three-dimensional protein-protein interaction networks, to understand molecular mechanisms of corresponding disorders. We have also developed network analyses frameworks to characterize the evolutionary dynamics of these protein networks. Another key dimension of our past work has been the use of statistical and machine-learning approaches for the analyses of high-dimensional antibody-omic to elucidate correlates of vaccine-mediated and natural immunity in HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.
We are currently working on using network systems and functional genomic approaches to perform multi-scale integration of genomic and epigenomic datasets with biological networks to identify molecular phenotypes underlying these immunological disorders, with an emphasis on autoimmune and alloimmune diseases. We also use high-dimensional statistical and machine-learning techniques to integrate multi-omic datasets (genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and antibody-omic) and elucidate molecular mechanisms of immune regulation and dysregulation.