Our research aims at reducing the global burden of infectious diseases and facilitating the development of novel solutions to combat current and future infections in an equitable way. In line with this vision, our work has three pillars: discovery, function, and translation. The overarching goal of this program is to understand how human genetic diversity leads to diversity in the outcome of infectious diseases and how we can translate this knowledge to better clinical care for all infectious disease patients.

Schematic of our research. We leverage the power of large EHR-linked biobanks such as our in-house biobank BioMe, the increasing body of publicly-available information about genes’ function and regulations, and cutting-edge computational methods to A) discover new infectious disease-associated variants; B) understand variants’ function, and C) predict individuals’ risk for developing severe outcomes for different infections. Moving forward, we will combine what we will learn about the genetic basis of susceptibility and resistance to infectious diseases with known pathogens’ genetic information and information about existing drugs to predict which individuals are at high risk of developing severe outcomes to novel/future pathogens and what drugs are most likely to be effective to combat these pathogens.