Research

The focus of our group is on elucidating the mechanisms that govern adaptive immunity and instantiating these in parsimonious mathematical models to enable efficient deduction of additional insights. We believe that there’s an inherent simplicity to the workings of immunity (and of nature in general), which can be effectively instantiated in parsimonious models if (and only if) the underlying mechanisms are known. With a sustained focus on their development, such models may eventually occupy a position as important as that currently enjoyed by wet-lab experimentation in the study of adaptive immunity.

A secondary interest is in developing useful technologies based on insights about adaptive immunity generated in our group and elsewhere. These include technologies for measuring immune responses to pathogens; for diagnosing various communicable and noncommunicable diseases; for designing vaccines; and for archiving data much more efficiently than conventionally possible by exploiting both the mechanisms of CRISPR immunity and the exceptionally high data density of DNA