Research Interests
My lab studies why immune systems age at different rates and why some people remain resilient while others become vulnerable to infection, poor vaccine responses, and frailty. A central challenge in this field is that immune aging cannot be explained by gene expression alone—it reflects changes in how immune cells are regulated, how they respond to stress, and how they return to balance.To address this, I am developing scIDiff, a computational framework designed to infer the dynamic control structure of immune cells from single-cell data. Rather than only describing cell states, scIDiff aims to quantify how stable or fragile those states are and how immune systems recover after perturbation.
This framework treats immunity as a dynamical system governed by a small set of regulatory “modes” that control sensitivity, stability, and recovery. My goal is to use this operator-based view to distinguish immune frailty, exhaustion, and resilience, and to understand how these patterns may differ across age, ancestry, and life history.
By focusing on immune regulation rather than just static gene expression, this work is designed to provide a new way to measure, compare, and ultimately predict immune aging across individuals and populations.