The Team

Melodi is coordinating the Antibody Observatory, an effort by the department to use serology to understand the burden, spread, prevention, and treatment of vector-borne diseases.

Michael is coordinating IMPAcTB, an international, multi-institution project that aims to identify and characterize mechanisms of host protection against tuberculosis across animal models and human patient cohorts.

Mike works with Bioinformatics, data munging, analysis of Next-Generation Sequence data, and proteomics data. Perl, R and shell scripting.

Forrest defines the parameters that are expected to drive the rate of resistance observed clinically and establish a quantitative estimate of risk of the emergence of drug resistance in clinical use to Pretomanid and a larger panel of compounds in development.

Doaa has a variety of scientific interests: Data management and governance for the life and health sciences, software development for the life and health sciences, reproducibility in the life sciences, systems biology, host-environment-pathogen interaction, early pathogen detection, diagnostics, accessible healthcare, personalized medicine, health systems performance, technology development. Douaa rarely accepts requests to review manuscripts, especially for commercial publishers.

Aayush’s work is focused around bringing advanced understanding of the Systems Serology platform to aid in the characterization of patient humoral immune profiles for different infection states. 

Eben utilizes research and industry experience to contribute to efforts in the Antibody Observatory. He is currently working on a serological tool to track the spread of vector borne diseases, as insect habitats continue to evolve due to climate change.

Sebastian’s work is focused around bringing advanced understanding of the Systems Serology platform to aid in the characterization of patient humoral immune profiles for different infection states.

Byron is highly motivated to provide advanced technical assistance for animal studies involving human pathogens across several laboratories within the department.

Jamie hopes to use his genetics training and varied lab experience to help the Fortune group to better understand the mechanisms behind Mtb infection and how these can be addressed.

Dianna works in the Observatory where they focus on antibody detection to identify vector-borne diseases. In addition to conducting wet lab experiments, she programs robotic arms.

Katy is an infectious diseases physician whose research focuses on investigating how antibodies shape the immune response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis across anatomical compartments and in the context of co-infections and prior infectious exposures. 

Nicole is working on understanding how genetic heterogeneity across M. tuberculosis clinical isolates impacts host-pathogen interactions.

Jane is interested in using traditional bacterial genetics to understand mechanistically how Mycobacterium tuberculosis evades antibiotic clearance.

Dan’s work focuses on improving our understanding of changes in the immune landscape in response to BCG vaccination at birth, as well as M. tuberculosis infection in pediatric patients and pregnant people.

Angel is engineering different anti-Mtb antibodies to elucidate the role of the humoral immune response against Mtb. His project can open doors to novel biotherapeutic strategies.

Krista is leveraging systems biology approaches to integrate omics datasets from tuberculosis patients and further elucidate the biological mechanisms and clinical features contributing to the heterogeneity in disease presentation across patients.

Charlotte is interested in functional antibody responses to vaccination, and uses systems biology frameworks to investigate correlates of protection to inform rational vaccine design.

Abigail is taking cues from Mycobacterium tuberculosis on what is important for its survival through studying genes under selection during infection. She is currently working towards understanding the effects of selection on a classic Mtb virulence system.

Maia is interested in understanding what good host protection against tuberculosis challenge looks like. She is currently working on defining the role of lung epithelial and stromal cells in immune cell circuits and crosstalk after vaccination or tuberculosis infection using single-cell RNA sequencing. Maia’s work is in collaboration with her co-mentor Adam Haber.