Computational Immunology

Computational immunology (or systems immunology) involves the development and application of bioinformatics methods, mathematical models and statistical techniques for the study of immune system biology. The immune system is composed of dozens of different cell types and hundreds of intersecting molecular pathways and signals. Systems approaches can be used to predict how the immune system will respond to a particular infection or vaccination. Or it can help understand how best to design an immunotherapy -- will it help ease disease and what might the side effects be? In addition, computational approaches are increasingly vital to understand the implications of the wealth of gene expression and epigenomics data being gathered from immune cells. Yale has a diverse research program in computational immunology that brings together expertise from a variety of scientific disciplines to bear on research projects in vaccine response, host-pathogen dynamics, cell-fate choices, immune genomics, informatics, and many other topics. Students interested in computational immunology can be co-mentored by faculty from the Immunology and Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Tracks.