Graduate Research
I study B cells, a major branch of the adaptive immune system.
B cells secrete a highly diverse range of antibodies. The membrane-bound forms of antibodies are called B cell receptors. Collectively, the receptors make up the B cell receptor repertoire.
Complex mechanisms are at play in the production and continuous modifications of this repertoire. One particularly important mechanism, somatic hypermutation, introduces mutations to B cell receptors at a rate that is unusually high compared to other cells, in the hope of increasing the B cells' binding affinity towards antigens.
This process leaves significant footprints which can be studied through receptor repertoire sequencing. My work involves performing applied analysis as well as developing novel methods for analyzing such sequencing data.
My lab at Yale School of Medicine: Kleinstein Lab
I'm a contributor to SHazaM and alakazam, two R packages developed by the lab to analyze B cell receptor repertoire sequencing data. Their respective source code repositories are here and here on Bitbucket.