The Cobey Lab in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago investigates how the dynamics of adaptive immunity shape the evolution and epidemiology of influenza and SARS-CoV-2. We use diverse computational modeling approaches in close collaboration with experimental collaborators in immunology, virology, and epidemiology, including as part of the NIH CIVIC and NIH CEIRR consortia. A current focus is to understand how immune memory evolves after repeated antigen exposures.
The postdoctoral fellow would work with Dr. Cobey’s lab and external collaborators to model immune responses to repeat influenza vaccination. Repeated vaccination sometimes appears to blunt the immune response, but the impact of vaccination appears sensitive to the strains involved, childhood infections, recent infections, and other factors. The primary source of data will come from a randomized clinical trial, the DRIVE Study, that Dr. Cobey leads with Dr. Benjamin Cowling at the University of Hong Kong. The DRIVE Study is now in its fourth year, and extensive longitudinal data are becoming available. Additional data come from other randomized trials and observational cohorts that PIs Dr. Cobey, Dr. Benjamin Cowling, and Dr. John Tsang (Yale University) are analyzing in a separate R01 to understand variability in responses to influenza infection and vaccination.
This research will fill a valuable gap by developing and testing mechanistic hypotheses to explain vaccine responses. Another goal will be prediction. This work will directly support other projects in the lab that aim to understand variability in vaccine effectiveness, develop new methods to estimate vaccine effectiveness, infer correlates of protection through dynamical models, and measure immunity in the population.
For more information, please see cobeylab.uchicago.edu/p/join-us.
