COBEY LAB - Key Persons
Alex is now an alumna of the Cobey lab. Below is an archived description.
Alex has developed cutting-edge projects in genomics (University of Wisconsin, The Genome Browser), mobile (the first voice recognition app for Android, called Voice Text), and civic software (the FCC Political Ad Data Archive, opensecrets.org, among others). He also spent five years at the Washington Post where he worked on distributing high-interest primary source documents and visualization.
His professional interests include reproducibility and other areas of digital metascience.
In his spare time he likes to cook, and go for walks in the woods of Maine where he lives with his wife and Blue Heeler.
Alex is interested in using computational models to study the dynamics of human immunity in response to infection and vaccination with the aim to improve longer-term model forecasts of infectious disease transmission.
Alonzo Finch, Research Assistant (2022 to 2023), University of Chicago Class of '23 in statistics
Alonzo is now an alumna of the Cobey lab. Below is an archived description.
Alonzo is assisting in modeling influenza infection using epidemiological and molecular data at both the national and regional levels. He is working on seeing how the size of previous influenza seasons can influence those that come later. He is currently a fourth year in The College at the University of Chicago studying Statistics.
Christopher studies the germline adaptive evolution of the naive antibody repertoire and of the immunoglobulin alleles.
Diana Vera Cruz, Research Scientist (2020 to 2022), Bioinformatician for the Center of Research Informatics at the University of Chicago
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Programmer
Ed Baskerville, Senior Research Programmer (2013 to 2019), Saving the internet from corporate domination.
Elena Whitney, Research Assistant (2020 to 2021), Medical student at U. Chicago
Frank Wen, PhD Student (2015 to 2018), Completing medical residency at U. Chicago.
Graham Northrup, Research Assistant (2017), PhD student at the Center for Computational Biology at UC Berkeley
Igor Vasiljevic, Research Assistant (2015), PhD student in computer science at the Toyota Technical Institute at Chicago
Job Titles:
- Senior Analyst - Grants Administration
Jessie helps further the team's research capabilities by managing internal and external research funds, projects and collaborative initiatives. Her finance, grant and project management experience combined with a journalism background contributes a reduced administrative burden to the team, so they can remain focused on their invaluable scientific inquiries and interests.
Katie Gostic, Research Scientist (2019 to 2022), Team lead at the CDC's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics
Lauren studies how the mechanisms and dynamics of affinity maturation in the adaptive immune system affect the diversity of individuals' antibody repertoires.
Manon studies the transmission and evolution of RNA viruses, through the analysis of their genetic data. Her previous work focused on elucidating HIV transmission dynamics in the UK and sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, she is integrating phylogenetic analysis into models forecasting the next flu and SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Scientist
Marcos studies the rapid evolution of B cells during the immune response and how this short-term evolution is enabled by the long-term evolution of immunoglobulin genes. He's also interested in how immune history shapes the evolution and epidemiology of influenza and other antigenically diverse pathogens.
Menna works on modeling the factors affecting vaccine immunogenicity, including viral evolution and repeat vaccination, leading to a better understanding of the variability in vaccine responsiveness.
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Scientist
Patrick McChesney, Senior Research Scientist (2022), Migrated to cloud software engineering and consulting.
Patrick is now an alumna of the Cobey lab. Below is an archived description.
Phil Arevalo, Research Scientist (2017 to 2022), Assistant Professor of the Practice in Biology and CIS at Wesleyan University
Rahul Subramanian, PhD student (2015 to 2017), Epidemiologist and ORISE Data Science Fellow at NIAID
Job Titles:
- Principal
- Principal Investigator
- Professor
Sarah is a professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at the University of Chicago.