My lab focuses on using a systems biology approach to study immunology. A dysfunctional or dysregulated immune system not only fails to offer protection, it can also introduce unnecessary immune responses such as allergies or autoimmune diseases. The key to immune modulation and engineering and regenerative medicine is to understand how the normal immune system works. However, a full understanding of the complex interactions among immune cells and between immune cells and cytokines and chemokines requires a quantitative and systems approach.

At the heart of the adaptive immune system, T cells and B cells need to respond to pathogenic antigen stimulation by changing their cellular programs to cell activation. However, at the end of an infection, a few of these responding cells put on a different cellular program to become long-term memory cells. How do cells make these choices and how external stimulations impact on these cellular program changes are fundamental questions to the understanding of the adaptive immune systems and to engineering immunity. Over the years, we have developed a suite of tools from characterizing biophysical interactions of antigen receptors and their cognate ligands to multi-dimensional profiling single T cells linking their antigen specificity to their transcriptome profiles. These tools are instrumental in our quest to the understanding of T and B cell fate choice and cellular programing in different disease settings, including cancer.