Sarah Cobey
Principal Investigatorcobey@uchicago.edu

Sarah is a professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at the University of Chicago.

Marcos Vieira
Senior Research Scientistmvieira@uchicago.edu

Marcos studies the rapid evolution of B cells during the immune response and how this short-term evolution is enabled by the long-term evolution of immunoglobulin genes. He’s also interested in how immune history shapes the evolution and epidemiology of influenza and other antigenically diverse pathogens.

Lauren McGough
Research Scientistmcgough@uchicago.edu

Lauren studies how the mechanisms and dynamics of affinity maturation in the adaptive immune system affect the diversity of individuals' antibody repertoires.

Manon Ragonnet
Research Scientistmanonragonnet@uchicago.edu

Manon studies the transmission and evolution of RNA viruses, through the analysis of their genetic data. Her previous work focused on elucidating HIV transmission dynamics in the UK and sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, she is integrating phylogenetic analysis into models forecasting the next flu and SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Christopher Joel Russo
PhD Studentcjrusso@uchicago.edu

Christopher studies the germline adaptive evolution of the naive antibody repertoire and of the immunoglobulin alleles.

Alexander Pillai
PhD Studentanpillai@uchicago.edu

Alex is interested in using computational models to study the dynamics of human immunity in response to infection and vaccination with the aim to improve longer-term model forecasts of infectious disease transmission.

Jessie Schmidt
Senior Analyst - Grants Administrationschmidtja@uchicago.edu

Jessie helps further the team's research capabilities by managing internal and external research funds, projects and collaborative initiatives. Her finance, grant and project management experience combined with a journalism background contributes a reduced administrative burden to the team, so they can remain focused on their invaluable scientific inquiries and interests.

Mennatallah Gouda
Research Analystvsr9798@uchicago.edu

Menna works on modeling the factors affecting vaccine immunogenicity, including viral evolution and repeat vaccination, leading to a better understanding of the variability in vaccine responsiveness.

Alumni

Alex Byrnes, Bioinformatician (2022 to 2024), Completing a Masters in Data Science program
Alonzo Finch, Research Assistant (2022 to 2023), University of Chicago Class of '23 in statistics
Patrick McChesney, Senior Research Scientist (2022), Migrated to cloud software engineering and consulting.
Diana Vera Cruz, Research Scientist (2020 to 2022), Bioinformatician for the Center of Research Informatics at the University of Chicago
Katie Gostic, Research Scientist (2019 to 2022), Team lead at the CDC's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics
Qifang Bi, Postdoctoral Researcher (2020 to 2022), Working on business strategy for BCG in Washington, D.C.
Phil Arevalo, Research Scientist (2017 to 2022), Assistant Professor of the Practice in Biology and CIS at Wesleyan University
Rachel Oidtman, Postdoctoral Researcher (2020 to 2022), Senior data scientist at Colorado Access
Dannie Griggs, Research Assistant (2020 to 2021),
Elena Whitney, Research Assistant (2020 to 2021), Medical student at U. Chicago
Spencer Carran, Research Scientist (2020), Biologist with the US FDA
Kangchon Kim, Postdoctoral Researcher (2017 to 2020), Transitioning to research science in Washington, D.C.
Ed Baskerville, Senior Research Programmer (2013 to 2019), Saving the internet from corporate domination.
Frank Wen, PhD Student (2015 to 2018), Completing medical residency at U. Chicago.
Sylvia Ranjeva, PhD Student (2014 to 2018), Medical resident at MGH in Boston
Graham Northrup, Research Assistant (2017), PhD student at the Center for Computational Biology at UC Berkeley
Daniel Zinder, Postdoctoral Researcher (2016 to 2017), Bioinformatician at Roche
Rohan Dandavati, Research Assistant (2017), Full stack developer at Google
Rahul Subramanian, PhD student (2015 to 2017), Epidemiologist and ORISE Data Science Fellow at NIAID
Colin Kyle, Research Programmer (2016), Game developer
Lev Tsypin, Research Assistant (2015), PhD student in systems biology at Caltech
Igor Vasiljevic, Research Assistant (2015), PhD student in computer science at the Toyota Technical Institute at Chicago