Ananya Saha | Cobey Lab

Immune system is a complex system with various players acting together to mount a response in case of a perturbation either via infection or vaccination. The remarkable ability of the immune system to remember past perturbations is the basis of vaccination and this is called immune memory. Quantifying immune memory dynamics is important to inform dynamics of vaccine mediated protection and is essential to assess long term effectiveness of vaccines. Additionally, immune memory dynamics helps design vaccination schedule.

Interestingly, past changes can affect how the immune system reacts now, so it’s hard to tell what a new perturbation alone does. This interference inherently makes it challenging to interpret the sole effect of repeat vaccination. This challenge multiplies when the target pathogen is rapidly evolving, for example, influenza. In the Cobey Lab, Ananya will model the post-vaccination immune response dynamics accounting for repeat vaccination for influenza. She hopes to mechanistically predict response following repeat vaccination and understand variability in the response.

Prior to her postdoc, she did her PhD in the Population Biology, Ecology, and Evolution program at Emory University. There her work focused on characterizing the immune response dynamics to multiple different vaccine antigens to quantify immune memory decay rate. She also worked with experimental immunologists to quantify CD8 T cell mediated protection against infection, disease, and transmission from laboratory experiments.

Apart from thinking about deep puzzles in Immunology, she enjoys cooking, exercising, and singing.