Research interests

Broadly, I am interested in how balance is achieved during the immune response to a virus. Viral diseases remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide and emerging viral pathogens represent a perennial threat to human health. The rapidity, quality, and duration of the immune response to a viral pathogen is a major determinant of disease outcome in viral disease. This immune response to a viral pathogen involves the activity of multiple cell types with distinct and multifaceted functional roles to mount a response that is appropriate in both time and space. An insufficient response may result in unrestrained viral replication while an overly robust response can result in direct tissue damage. Thus, an effectively regulated antiviral immune response requires complex coordination, communication, and regulation between individual immune cells.

I like to think of these coordinated multicellular networks as “immune polyphony” – a reference to musical polyphony where multiple individual voices come together to create harmony. You can find my PhD thesis on this topic here.

In my PhD, I have:

• Applied integrative multi-omic single-cell techniques to human cohorts of primary viral infection.
• Generated first single-cell atlas of peripheral immune response to severe COVID-19.
• Applied insights from single-cell transcriptomics to develop novel immunomodulatory therapeutics for COVID-19.
• Designed first computational method for comparative cell-cell communication analysis at single-cell resolution.
• Developed methods for bio-orthogonal manipulation of immune cell transcriptome.
• Established and maintained bench and computational pipelines for multiple single-cell sequencing techniques in the laboratory. 

Further work to develop high-resolution genome-wide spatial profiling technologies, additional multimodal single-cell techniques, along with better databases linking ligands to cell type-specific gene expression changes will continue to facilitate more holistic and comprehensive models of immune polyphony that can be modulated for therapeutic benefit.