People



Cliburn Chan Assistant Professor

Cliburn Chan Research Interests: Coming from a background of both medicine and mathematics, I enjoy collaborating with basic and clinical researchers in immunology to build models that can provide a different perspective and insight into complex system behaviors observed in the laboratory or clinical trials. Broadly, I am interested in building mathematical and simulation models to study how the immune response is coordinated and regulated across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales, from individual receptor signaling to immune memory responses that can persist for a lifetime. This involves the development of sub-models in code in such a way that the individual modules can be flexibly combined to form more complex higher level models. A basic need of such an approach is the ability to extract reliable quantitative information from laboratory and clinical assays, and I am particularly interested in the development of statistical methodology and software tools for flow cytometry, which is unique in its ability to characterize the functionality of immune cells at both the individual and population levels simultaneously.
Phone: 919.668.2459

Stanca Ciupe Postdoctoral Fellow

Stanca Ciupe Research Interests: Stanca Ciupe received a PhD in Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where she studied mathematical biology. Her research interest is in mathematical modeling, mathematical biology, theoretical immunology, delay differential equations and model selection theory. Her current research focuses on developing and analyzing mathematical models of T lymphocyte development and diversity following transplantation. She is also interested in understanding how cross-reactive immune mechanisms may help the HIV virus escape, by studying mathematical models of humoral responses during HIV infection.
stanca ciupe at duke dot edu Phone: 919.668.5895

Feng Feng Research Associate

Feng Feng Research Interests: Feng Feng received a PhD in immunology and a Master in Computer Science at Cornell University. He then came to Dr Kepler's group for a postdoctrial fellowship in the computational immunology. His research interest is in innate immunity and Dendrite Cell immunology, as well as mathematical modeling of immunity. Currently he is working on a NIH funded project. The overall goal of this project is to develop computational tools to aid in the development of vaccine adjuvants. He is also working together with other researchers to develop statistical models/tools to understand the immune responses/events occurring after the adjuvant challenges.
Phone: 919.668.5892

Sheng Feng Assistant Professor

Sheng Feng Research Interests: Sheng Feng's research interest is in statistical genetics and bioinformatics. He received his PhD in statistics from North Carolina State University in 2004 where he studied statistical methods for microarray data analysis, genomewide association mapping and proteomics data analysis. Here in Duke, he provides biostatistical service for the Center For AIDS Research (CFAR). He is also working for the Murdock study.
Sheng Feng Phone: 919.668.5891

Min He Senior Research Associate

Min He Research Interests: Min He earned his PhD in chemical informatics at the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He did postdoctoral fellowships in Computer Simulation at Tsinghua University, Beijing China, and Chemical Informatics at Mayo Clinic. He is a senior research associate working on Bioinformatics for Professor Thomas B. Kepler at Duke University Laboratory of Computational Immunology. His research contributions have focused on spectratype analysis by estimating CDR3 length for functional beta-chain T-cell receptors inpatients after thymus transplantation. He has also designed and developed a secured collaborative research environment for investigators sharing research data and download analyses. It is used both on campus and across campuses.
Phone: 919.684.6055

Al Haines Laboratory Research Analyst

Al Haines Research Interests: Multiple scientific disciplines coming together through the application of biotechnology. These interests have developed over a period of years while Al worked in several fields at Duke University Medical Center. These fields include special coagulation, histocompatibility and immunogenetics, and HIV vaccine design. Al currently helps anchor the experimental component of the integrative research in dulci.
Phone: 919.684.3342

Tom Kepler Professor, Division Chief

Tom Kepler Research Interests:Tom is interested in immunology and host defense, and the evolution of systems that carry out these functions. He studies them using system reconstruction, in which quantitative experimental data are integrated via computational modeling to elucidate the emergence of system-level behavior from the interactions among their components. Specific applications include vaccine adjuvant design, the orgin and maintenance of antigen receptor diversity, and immunity in non-traditional species.
Phone: 919.668.0620

Changquing Li Research Associate

Changquing Li Research Interests:Changqing Li, PhD, is currently a research associate in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University. He received his PhD and Master in Computer Science and Information Science from National University of Singapore, Singapore and Peking University, China in 2006 and 2001, respectively. Dr. Li earned many awards during his PhD, master, and bachelor study periods, and one of his previous papers was one of the two Best Student Paper Award Candiates in a top international database conference (different from other science areas, the primary publication venue in the database area is international conferences). Dr. Li is working with Dr. Cowell on database, textmining, information retrieval, ontology management, and knowledgebase in immune systems.
Phone: 919.668.5894

Tim Lucas Research Associate

Tim Lucas Research Interests: I am currently researching numerical methods for large scale immunological simulations. We model cytokines by a three-dimensional system of reaction-diffusion equations with source terms that are centered on immune cells whose motion is stochastic. The simulations are based on a first order splitting method that allows us to take advantage of known numerical methods for the diffusion, reaction and stochastic differential equations. In particular, I have implemented a parallel multigrid scheme for the diffusion. The focus of my research is now shifting to boundary integral methods for the diffusion that will reduce the dimension of the problem by one and significantly increase the speed of the computations.
lucas at math dot duke dot edu Phone: 919.684.3924

Dejan Milutinovic Research Associate

Dejan Milutinovic Research Interests: Dejan Milutinovic received his Dipl. Ing. (1995, five-year university degree) and M.Sc. (1999, pre-Bologna) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia, and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2004) from Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon Technical University, Portugal. From 1995 he was employed at the Institute "Mihajlo Pupin", Belgrade, working on real-time control industrial applications. In 2000 he moved to the Institute for Systems and Robotics, Lisbon, where he worked on his PhD thesis. From 2004 to 2006 he was a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Rob De Boer at the Theoretical Biology Department of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Presently, he is a research associate at the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Department of Duke University Medical Center, NC, USA. Dr Milutinovic's scientific interest is in the area of modeling and control of stochastic dynamical systems applied to the immune system and Robotics. In 2005, he was the first runner-up for the best PhD thesis of European Robotics by the European Robotics Research Network (EURON) jury in the 5th edition of Georges Giralt PhD Award. As a result, the monograph "Cells and Robots: Modeling and Control of Large-Size Agent Populations", Springer, appeared in Springer Tracts of Advanced Robotics Series and is co-authored by Prof. Pedro Lima from Instituto Superior Tecnico.
Phone: 919.684.3924

Supriya Munshaw PhD Student

Supriya Munshaw Research Interests: Supriya is a graduate student in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program at Duke. She grew up in Ahmedabad, India and moved to the US in 2000 to attend Bard College, NY. She received her BA in Biology in May 2004 before starting at Duke in August. She has been with DULCI since May 2005 and her main interest lies in the area of HIV vaccine development. Currently, she is working on a phylogenetic software that allows for recombination to study within-host HIV evolution. In her spare time, she likes to read fiction, run outside and work out at the gym.
sm87 at duke dot edu Phone: 919.668.5896

Ana Paula Sales PhD Student

Ana Paula Sales Research Interests: In general, I am interested in the immune system and in the development of affordable and effective therapeutics. Currently, I am studying the interaction between MHC molecules and peptides, with the ultimate goal of identifying epitopes to be used in vaccines against pathogens responsible for emerging infectious diseases.
Phone: 919.668.5876

Joe Volpe PhD Student

Joe Volpe Research Interests: Joe studies biases -- deviations from strict randomness -- that exist with the genetics and mechanisms involved in the creation of human antigen receptors for the adaptive immune system. Joe created and developed a statistical software tool for determining the most likely gene segments and processes involved in the creation of a given antigen receptor gene. Upon completion and peer review, this tool has now been used as the first step in the study of a large portion of the immunoglobulin gene repertoire currently available in Genbank. By assembling and carefully filtering a large pool of Ig genes, Joe has been able to employ statistical techniques in the study of adult human Ig to arrive at the most accurate V, D, and J gene usage statitics currently available. This large set of data has also helped Joe to uncover interesting biases that affect the adult human Ig repertoire.
Phone: 919.668.5897

Kevin Wiehe Research Associate

Kevin Wiehe Research Interests: Kevin's background is in computational structural biology. His general research interests are in applying computational methods to fight disease. He received his PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University in 2007 where he studied methods for improving protein-protein docking. His work here at Duke is in studying broadly neutralizing HIV-1 antibodies through a wide array of computational structural biology approaches. The current focus of that research involves computational modeling of the interaction between HIV peptides/proteins and viral membranes through macromolecular simulation.
Phone: 919.668.5893
Duke University Medical Center