POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATE

Thisd Position is Fully Grant Funded

School of Medicine Established in 1930, Duke University School of Medicine is the youngest of the nation's top medical schools. Ranked sixth among medical schools in the nation, the School takes pride in being an inclusive community of outstanding learners, investigators, clinicians, and staff where interdisciplinary collaboration is embraced and great ideas accelerate translation of fundamental scientific discoveries to improve human health locally and around the globe. Composed of more than 2,500 faculty physicians and researchers, more than 1,300 students, and more than 6,000 staff, the Duke University School of Medicine along with the Duke University School of Nursing, Duke University Health System and the Private Diagnostic Clinic (PDC) comprise Duke Health. a world-class academic medical center. The Health System encompasses Duke University Hospital, Duke Regional Hospital, Duke Raleigh Hospital, Duke Primary Care, Duke Home and Hospice, Duke Health and Wellness, and multiple affiliations.

Postdoctoral Associate

We are looking for a postdoc in computational immunology to develop an in silico model of therapeutic interventions for prevention of congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) based on identified immune correlates of cCMV transmission and placental tissue models. The model will be calibrated from a uniquely large cohort of acutely CMV-infected pregnant women (n = 399) to predict the outcome of a CMV vaccine in protection against placental virus transmission, as well as the ability of maternal plasma antibodies to block virus spread at the maternal-fetal interface. Moreover, this model can be refined through the study of CMV replication in a placental organoid model, past and concurrent challenge models a non-human primate model. This work will build on an existing maternal/placental/fetal model developed by our group for CMV transmission in the Rhesus macaque model, and extend it by including specific immune responses, especially at the maternal-fetal interface, using neural differential equation approaches for model calibration.

The postdoc will also receive training in immune data science, and the analysis of complex immunological data sets, and be part of a community of virologists, immunologists, statisticians, and mathematicians within the Duke Center for Human Systems Immunology.

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