Chronic infections present a large global health threat and therefore prevention is currently a major focus for reducing disease prevalence. The prevention strategies of vaccination have shown some highly promising results on diseases such as HIV and HSV-1, and the advancement and evolution of vaccine development in VIDD involves an ambitious team of scientists. Basic scientists, computer and animal modelers, statisticians, epidemiologists and clinicians work together throughout this rigorous process, from idea conception to clinical trial design and finally to vaccine production.
Faculty
Alphabetical Listing:
Select a letter to display a list of Faculty members
Research interests include early innate immune responses to HIV vaccines on subsequent adaptive immune responses and systems biology analyses of how immune responses are shaped
Research interests include sexual risk taking, victimization and alcohol/drug abuse among African-American women, HIV prevention for African American and African-born populations and health disparities.
Clinical trial data management, Logistics, operations and study facilitation, Scientific communications, Host-pathogen interactions
High-dimensional data analysis
Characterizes virus diversity, evolution, circulation patterns. Identifies epidemiological patterns from sequence data and develops methods to predict evolutionalry growth or decay across strains.
Infections in the immunocompromised host, especially diagnosis, prevention and treatment of CMV, VZV, BK virus, adenovirus, and respiratory virus infections. Research includes understanding the genetic basis of infection complications, genome and gene expression studies.
Research focus is HIV and herpesvirus vaccine development, herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) pathogenesis and the host immune response. Immunotherapeutic approaches to viral infections and cancer
Characterizing T cells induced by candidate vaccines using flow cytometry. Developing new assays to evaluate vaccine efficacy with HIV Vaccine Trials Network. Studies include examining T cell function at the single-cell level using advanced flow cytometric techniques; examples include T cell responses to vaccination and to viral infections such as CMV, EBV, HIV, and hepatitis B.
The conduct of HIV vaccine trials, novel vaccine strategies, the conduct of clinical trials in resource-poor settings, and factors that help prevent sexual transmission of HIV.
Statistical and computational methods for bioinformatics applications, statistical modeling for genome sequence analysis and statistical modeling frameworks. The interface between computer science, statistics, and molecular biologyand such as development of new informatics methods in genomics and post-genomics
Computational and statistical methods development for high-throughput, high-content biological data.
Modeling and integration of data from high throughput assays for biomarker discovery, clinical outcome prediction and disease classification.
Current studies include development of methods for T-cell based sieve analysis, quantification of vaccine induced T cell responses, systems biology of influenza and time-dependent correlates analysis of HIV efficacy trial.
Research focus includes vaccine clinical trials, the design and analysis of Phase I/II trials, for evaluating vaccine effects on immune responses; the design and analysis of Phase 2b/III trials, for evaluating vaccine efficacy, immune correlates, sieve analysis, and post-infection vaccine effects; general biostatistical methods research, such as survival analysis, causal inference, and evaluation of surrogate endpoints
Developing methods and tools for high-throughput, high-dimensional experiments with applications in vaccine research, immunology and immunotherapy; flow cytometry, peptide microarrays, next generation sequencing; Bayesian inference and computation and statistical computing
Design, conduct, monitoring, and analysis of multicenter randomized clinical trials and comparative effectiveness studies, measuring and improving the effectiveness of informed consent in clinical research; improving the quality and efficiency of clinical trial data management; clinical research trials for the prevention or treatment of HIV / AIDS and vaccine clinical trials
Research interests include the interplay between T follicular helper cells and B cells during immune responses, roles of the innate immune system in vaccination and HIV-1 vaccine development.
Statistical methods in biomarker evaluation for disease screening, surrogate endpoint identification, and treatment selection; genome-wide association studies and causal inference
Immunologic endpoint determination for experimental vaccines (HIV, pneumococcus, malaria, TB, flu) and
Logistics, operations, quality assurance, and assay validation for immunologic evaluation of vaccines in the clinical trial setting
Research focus includes statistical methods for bioassays (e.g., flow cytometry, sequencing); dynamic modeling of biological systems (e.g., multi-type cell populations, B-cell repertoire); nonparametric methods for supervised and unsupervised learning; stochastic processes (e.g., branching processes); algorithms for scalable data analysis.
Clinical trials methodology; Vaccine evaluation; biomarker that predict an individual’s response to a given treatment and statistical analyses of vaccine trial data
Design and analysis of vaccine efficacy trials, genotype-specific vaccine efficacy-based sieve analysis,immune correlates of vaccine protection, analysis of vaccine-induced immune response durability and survival analysis
HIV vaccine development and trial design, combination HIV prevention, mucosal immunology and mucosal sampling design in HIV prevention trials, the intersection of oncology and infectious disease, comparative effectiveness, decision analysis and health-related quality of life
HIV and tuberculosis (Tb) vaccine research and development, human challenge experiments, microbiome modulation of immunity, immune activation—polymicrobial infections, combination HIV prevention, malaria clinical trials/vaccines and molecular epidemiology
Research interests involved developing and implementing clinical trials for HIV vaccines, mucosal sampling in HIV Vaccine trials and cultural/community challenges in implementing Vaccine Trials in Africa
Research interests include analysis of immune response to vaccine candidates, study design for pilot studies, statistical methods for biological assays, and infectious disease models.
Adjunct Professor, Pathobiology, Global Health, and Laboratory Medicine, University of Washington
Research centers on developing an HIV vaccine and investigating the complex relationship between HIV and the immune system and the influence of antiretroviral therapy.
Research interests include HIV-1 immunogen design, the development of broadly neutralizing antibodies for HIV-1 infection and antigen-B cell interactions.
Study T cell fate and function in healthy and inflamed tissues and following infection with HIV and manipulate these responses for therapeutic purposes
Interest in describing the quantitative and dynamical features of human pathogens and immune responses. Most of work to-date is on the pathogenesis of HSV-2 infection but also interested in applying models to optimize viral eradication strategies, and to use models to capture kinetic features of the human microbiome.
Research focus includes the analysis of humoral immune response to HSV-2 and its vaccine candidates and understanding the role of tissue B cells in HSV-2 infection
Research is focused on the development of a safe and effective vaccine to combat the spread of HIV and to investigate how HIV infection leads to AIDS. Two major areas of research is to better understand how neutralizing antibodies against HIV are developed during natural HIV-infection,and engineer immunogens that will elicit broadly neutralizing antibody responses against HIV.
Structural molecular immunology and vaccinology: using biophysical approaches to study proteins and interactions mediating or modulating adaptive and innate immune responses
Epidemiologic studies of infectious disease transmission, vaccine studies and the development of novel statistical methods and designs for studies of infectious disease transmission. Efficacy and effectiveness assessments of control and prevention strategies for infectious diseases of import to global health, including influenza, cholera, dengue, and tuberculosis
Research interests involve mechanisms driving the differentiation of B cells following vaccination and infection, understanding how differences in the pre-immune repertoire influences immunity and vaccine Development
Epidemiology, natural history, therapy, and prevention of HSV and other herpesvirus infections; interactions between HSV and HIV Vaccines and clinical trials