Josh Weinstein jaweinst at stanford dot edu University of Pennsylvania, BA Physics/Biophysics 2006 Current Position: NSF- and SGF-funded Grad Student in Stanford's Biophysics Doctoral Program. Current Lab: The Big One. Research interests: Biophysics, information theory, branching processes, and turbulence. Publications, contributed talks, background, etc: please see my partial CV.

My approach to this problem uses high-throughput sequencing to determine the collective "repertoire" of immune receptors. Sequencing costs have experienced exponential decay over the past several years, and the quality of sequence output has itself experienced a rapid increase. This means that subtle variation within populations of sequences is only now becoming observable to researchers.

My work can be classified under two headers. On the one hand, I am interested in the basic governing dynamics of the immune system, ie how do immune cell lineages explore the space of possible receptor sequences, and what are the physical limitations they encounter in finding the solution in such a short time? This has led me to make heavy use of a simple model organism, the zebrafish. On the other hand, I am interested in exploiting this reductionism to facilitate our understanding of diseases in humans. I hope to apply this understanding to the development of powerful diagnostic and prognostic tools by making an individual's immune "memory" an open book for both clinicians and laboratory scientists.