2024
August 1
Congratulations to Daniel (Sang Woo) on being awarded a highly competitive
LSRF fellowship!
July 23
We publish our
first paper on the DRIVE Study, a randomized clinical trial to examine the effects of repeated influenza vaccination in adults. (Only some warm-up results in this one.)
July 22
Welcome to
Sang Woo (Daniel) Park, who is joining the lab for his postdoc. He will work with us on the community ecology of pathogens.
June 11
Lauren's paper on the interaction of immune memory and viral evolution is
published in PNAS.
2023
October 27
We find that measuring neutralizing antibodies at the population level
can help predict which clade of influenza will dominate and which age groups will be infected.
October 24
We are pleased to welcome Mennatallah Gouda as a new Research Analyst to the Cobey Lab team. Welcome!
October 2
Alexander Pillai begins his PhD in the lab!
March 18
Sarah
weighs in on the new evidence for market origins in the
New York Times.
March 17
In collaboration with the US Flu Vaccine Effectiveness Network and researchers at the CDC and Harvard School of Public Health,
we report that repeat vaccination effects cannot be fully explained by clinical infection history or differences in the timing of vaccination between people---but influenza infections that are not medically attended might explain this puzzling phenomenon.
February 1
Using simulations and experiments, Marcos Vieira and colleagues find that B cell evolution has many paths to high affinity and is not constrained by fitness differences hardcoded in germline immunoglobulin genes.
January 30
Welcome to Jessie Schmidt, our new grants specialist and program manager!
2022
September 21
Congratulations to Phil, who has started as new faculty at Wesleyan University; to Katie, who is leading a new group at CDC's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics; to Diana, who has transitioned to a bioinformatics position at U. Chicago's Center for Research Informatics; and to Qifang, who has turned to the "dark side" (her words) of consulting! Unsurprisingly, the lab is
hiring again!
August 13
Welcome to
Manon Ragonnet, a new research scientist who brings her phylogenetics expertise to bear on our efforts to integrate evo-epidemiological models.
July 1
Sarah has been promoted to full professor.
May 1
Welcome to
Alex Byrnes, our new senior research programmer, to
Alonzo Finch, a undergraduate statistics major at U. Chicago and research assistant, and to
Patrick McChesney, incoming senior research scientist!
2021
October 20
Our lab needs to grow! We are searching for several postdocs or senior research scientists and a software engineer/developer. More
here.
July 14
Our
new paper finds the strange age distribution of flu B cases might be explained by the order in which individuals are infected with different strains, with extra protection against B/Yamagata in people first infected with it.
May 28
Since spring 2020, our group has provided weekly and then biweekly reports and briefings to the Illinois governor's office, Illinois Department of Public Health, and city and county public health departments. This week marks potentially our last report, although we continue to maintain local transmission estimates and historical analyses at
illinoiscovid.org.
May 16
CNN
interviews Katie about temperature checkpoints.
April 1
We are excited to be part of a new
seven-year NIAID-funded CEIRR center to do basic research on the dynamics of influenza and SARS-CoV-2. We'll be working closely with collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, University of Hong Kong, University of Arizona, and other sites.
March 23
Katie and Sarah discuss epidemic metrics with
Quanta Magazine, which had also
interviewed Katie in January. We have also recently talked with the
New York Times,
Al Jazeera,
Washington Post,
Science,
Nature,
The Atlantic,
Vox (twice),
Stat,
MIT Technology Review,
Scientific American,
ABC News,
Science News, and
BBC Future. Vaccine misallocation at U. Chicago was covered in the
Chicago Tribune.
2020
November 30
Welcome to
Qifang Bi, who recently completed her PhD in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins SPH. Qifang will be investigating immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 for the PARIS-SPARTA studies and variation in the effectiveness of the seasonal flu vaccine. She will be co-advised by Marc Lipsitch.
October 19
Our NIH-funded
DRIVE Study, which investigates the effect of seasonal influenza vaccination and infection on immune responses, starts enrollment in Hong Kong!
September 1
Welcome to
Rachel Oidtman, PhD, a new postdoc in the lab! She'll work on modeling longitudinally the development of immune protection to flu.
June 15
Diana Vera Cruz, PhD, joins the lab as a research scientist. She'll be analyzing immune responses to a universal influenza vaccine candidate. Welcome, Diana!
April 30
Congratulations to Dr. Marcos Vieira on his impressive PhD defense!
March 23
Most of the lab is now working full-time, and then some, on the COVID-19 response. We are so happy to be joined by alumni Frank Wen, Sylvia Ranjeva, and Ed Baskerville!
March 10
Welcome to Lauren McGough! With her NIH Kirschstein (F32) fellowship, Lauren will investigate the foundations of adaptive immune evolution.
January 2
Welcome to Spencer Carran! He'll be studying influenza vaccine immunogenicity and effectiveness.
2019
September 1
Welcome to Katie Gostic, who starts her James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship!
July 26
Congratulations to Phil on being awarded an F32!
July 14
First flu infections determine susceptibility throughout life, and potentially vaccine effectiveness. New
preprint by Phil (and a parallel
study by Katie Gostic, who joins the lab this fall).
July 1
Our
R01 to model the longitudinal development of immunity to influenza (with collaborator
Aubree Gordon at U. Michigan) begins!
June 20
We say good-bye to Ed, who is heading off to found his own startup to save us from Facebook and all the rest. His statistical and programming advice will live on in our models forever.
April 10
Our
paper in
Nature Communications shows how immune memory shapes protection to influenza in adults and children. Bonuses: Estimation of imprinting effects, epidemic sizes, household transmission, & more!
2018
June 29
Sarah eventually checks her text messages and discovers she has been awarded tenure!
June 1
Ed returns to the fold to model the development of immunity to flu. True to form, he immediately proposes provocatively simple models. It's good to have him back!
May 17
Congratulations to Frank on his successful PhD defense! We are happy to have him around another few months before he returns to medical school.
May 10
Marcos has been awarded a William Rainey Harper Fellowship, one of the University of Chicago's highest honors. Congratulations, Marcos!
April 27
Congratulations to Sylvia for successfully defending her PhD thesis!
2017
October 6
Phil Arevalo joins the lab as a postdoctoral researcher. Welcome, Phil!
June 1
Rohan Dandavati and Graham Northrup join the Cobey lab. Welcome!
April 17
Kangchon Kim joins the lab as a postdoc! Welcome, Kangchon!
January 23
Scott Hensley and Sarah propose that many patterns in influenza immunology make sense in light of
original sin.
2016
December 15
Sylvia was awarded an NIH F30 grant. Congratulations, Sylvia!
May 12
Frank and Marcos both successfully defended their dissertation proposals this week and are now PhD candidates. Congratulations!
April 18
Sarah gives a seminar in the NYU Department of Biology.
January 6
Sarah and Ed's
new paper shows that causal inference using state-space reconstruction is unreliable in natural systems.
2015
December 10
Daniel Zinder joins the lab as a postdoc! Welcome, Daniel!
December 1
Colin Kyle joins the lab as a research programmer. Welcome, Colin!
November 27
Sarah was
interviewed on NPR about influenza's phylogeography and its coevolution with the immune system.
September 14
Rahul Subramanian begins his PhD in the lab!
July 20
Sarah teaches a 2.5-day course on "Pathogen evolution, selection, and immunity" with
Trevor Bedford at the Statistics and Modeling in Infectious Diseases (SISMID) summer school in Seattle.
June 15
Lev Tsypin, a third year undergraduate, begins his summer rotation in the lab! He'll be working with Igor on fitting nonlinear dynamics.
May 14
Igor Vasiljevic joins the lab to investigate methods to fit stochastic, nonlinear dynamical models.
March 19
Sarah presents at the RAPIDD workshop "Modeling and predicting influenza phenotypes" at Cambridge University.
2014
December 1
Congratulations to Sylvia for successfully defending her thesis proposal!
November 29
Congratulations to Marcos, whose
paper has just been published in
Ecology Letters!
July 17
Our
new paper argues that pathogens evolve in a more complex immune environment than most models assume, and the differences matter.
2013
December 11
Sarah gives a talk at the J. Craig Venter Institute.
October 14
Sarah and Jack Gilbert receive a $75,000 seed grant from the DoE to develop methods to infer pathogen interactions.
October 4
Sarah gives a talk at Swarthmore.
August 12
Sylvia Ranjeva begins her rotation in the lab! She'll be working on a HPV project she started with
Greg Dwyer.
July 17
Frank Wen joins the lab to work on the phylogeography of influenza!