Members

John Barton, PI  
John is an Associate Professor of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. He studies pathogen evolution and immunology using methods inspired by statistical physics.

Yirui Gao, Graduate Student  
Yirui is interested in fitness inference from evolutionary histories using methods from statistical physics. Recently, she has been working on using quantitative trait models to study HIV evolution.

Gargi Kher, Graduate Student  
Gargi is a CMU-Pitt Computational Biology PhD student co-mentored by Dr. Shikhar Uttam. She's broadly interested in using quantitative methods to understand how the decisions, interactions and spatial organization of components of our immune system contribute to disease.

Maddie Shaklee, Graduate Student  
Maddie is a CMU-Pitt Computational Biology PhD student co-advised with Dr. Harinder Singh. She is interested in using computational and mathematical approaches to understand how immune cells sense and respond to signals, with a focus on how T-cell activation thresholds shape immune memory and disease outcomes.

Dylan Wells, Graduate Student  
Dylan is a Pitt Physics PhD student. He has previously worked in building evolutionary algorithms to optimize radio astronomy instrumentation. Now, he is largely interested in using computation and statistical physics to study evolutionary dynamics and fitness inference.

Saúl Castillo, Graduate Student  
Saúl is a CMU-Pitt Computational Biology Ph.D. student interested in predictive models of viral evolution and the role of antigenic properties in shaping evolutionary dynamics.

Meilin Scott, Master's Student  
Meilin is a Master’s student in Automated Science - Biological Experimentation at Carnegie Mellon University. She is focused on the evolution of the HMPV virus.