IGI Seminar Series: Epistasis and Surprise: From Protein Space, to Drug(g)ability and Beyond

Summary

Join us to learn about new research at the intersection of evolutionary theory, population genetics, and biomedicine. The seminar, led by Assistant Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University will cover his lab's research on epistasis and the development of evolution-inspired metrics for drugability. Ogbunu's work emphasizes combining conceptual, quantitative, and empirical methods to simultaneously address questions that are both theoretically interesting and practically relevant. Read more about his research here.

Join us for the live event on Zoom. All participants and hosts are required to sign into a Zoom account prior to joining meetings.

Speaker

C. Brandon Ogbunu — Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. His research takes place at the intersection of evolutionary biology, genetics, and epidemiology. He uses experimental evolution, mathematical modeling, and computational biology to better understand the underlying causes and consequences of disease, across scales: from the biophysics of proteins involved in drug resistance to the social determinants driving epidemics at the population level. In doing so, he aims to develop theory that enriches our understanding of the evolutionary and ecological underpinnings of disease, while contributing to practical solutions for clinical medicine and public health. He completed his Ph.D. at Yale University in 2010 and postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and the Broad Institute. He has been the recipient of the UNCF-Merck, the Broad Institute Diversity Fellowship, and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. He comes to Yale after two years on the faculty at Brown University. Ogbunu is also a contributing writer at Wired and a visiting research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.