How do you explain your job to someone who knows nothing about it?

I’m a scientist and I study antibodies. Antibodies are one of the most successful classes of drugs in the history of medicine because they do two things at once: they bind tightly to a target, like a virus or a tumor cell for example, and they send instructions to the rest of our immune system about how to respond to it.

My work focuses on using AI and engineering to understand and redesign those instructions, with the goal of creating antibodies that direct immune responses more precisely.

What brought you to BRI?

I came to BRI because of its deep expertise and infrastructure in human immunology. There are scientists and clinicians here with expertise spanning basic immunology to human disease and clinical research, alongside an incredible biorepository that makes it possible to ask questions that would be difficult to answer almost anywhere else.

For someone like me who is interested in uniting protein engineering and AI with human immunology, that creates an ideal environment for discovering where the platforms and technologies I develop can have the greatest impact.

How did you become interested in your area of research?

It took me a while to find the particular area of biomedical research that was most exciting to me. I thought genetics was cool, neuroscience was cool, even sports medicine for a bit. But it eventually became clear to me that understanding the immune system is central to understanding how we prevent and treat almost every human disease. That is why I studied immunology during my PhD.

During this time, it struck me that the remaining disease challenges, like TB (which I studied during my PhD), cancer, and most autoimmune conditions, often represent situations where natural immunity is insufficient, or even actively harmful. And that solving these problems may require us not just to understand the immune system, but to actively rewire or reprogram it.

That is really what brought me to this field of immune engineering which seeks to engineer cells and molecules of the immune system to build new ways of controlling immunity and ultimately to combat disease.

What are 1-2 research projects that you plan to work on at BRI?

One major project in my lab will be to understand how changes in antibody sequence alter the instructions it sends to different immune cells. I plan to build a massive atlas connecting antibody sequences to immune function, then use those data to train AI models that can predict immune function directly from sequence and, eventually, generative AI models that can design antibodies to produce specific immune responses. The goal is to create a fundamentally new way of designing immune function for biology and medicine.

I’m also interested in extending these ideas beyond antibodies to design other immune proteins – like cytokines, chemokines, and cellular receptors – that direct immune responses in ways nature never evolved but that could be valuable for treating disease.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I love traveling. I lived in Switzerland for the past few years and really enjoyed having the chance to explore different countries around Europe – the cultures, the food, the wine. So I’m looking forward to exploring the Pacific Northwest now. It’s so green and beautiful, and I hear there’s a lot of great wine here as well!

I'm also a big sports guy. I mostly play soccer these days, but I grew up playing and watching almost everything, so I'm happy I ended up in such an amazing sports town. I'm excited to get into Seattle's sports culture in the coming years.