The NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology is building community and expanding research possibilities with the Institute’s Research-In-Progress meetings. This meeting series convenes members of the NSF-Simons NITMB community to an informal venue for discussion of ongoing and planned projects. We are proud to invite a wide variety of scientists and mathematicians to share their work with our community. While Research-In-Progress meetings are only intended for members of the NITMB, we want to publicly spotlight some of the researchers who will be joining us to share insight into their career and work.
Lauren McGough, Postdoctoral Researcher, Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago
Lauren McGough is a postdoctoral research scientist in Sarah Cobey’s lab in the Ecology and Evolution department at the University of Chicago. As part of the Cobey lab, McGough studies the interplay between pathogen evolution and host immunological memory, with a focus on modeling how differences in individuals' infection histories impact both differences in their protection against infection and resulting patterns of pathogen evolution at the population level.
We spoke with Lauren McGough to learn more about McGough's work at the interface of mathematics and biology, and the benefits the NITMB offers to McGough’s research network.
What is your current research area?
“Much of my research aims to understand how collective patterns or behaviors arise from complex interactions among many individual players in biology. These days, the patterns I think about are dynamical patterns of pathogen evolution, and the complex interactions are transmission events between people with different exposure histories (and thus different susceptibility to pathogen strains). I've been thinking a lot about immunological memory in this context; a pathogen's past patterns of strain evolution are in a sense encoded in the distribution of immunological memory profiles of individuals in the population, which then play an important role in determining which strains have advantages going forward. I find the back-and-forth between population scale dynamics and host-scale immunity to be fascinating.”
What disciplines does your research integrate?
“My research uses mathematical techniques, such as differential equations and probability theory, to address questions that relate to immunology, epidemiology, and evolution. I work on theory, where I try to understand the possible behaviors of models in different parameter regimes, and then I try to understand what the theory says about real systems by applying statistical inference and mechanistic models of immunity to longitudinal infection data.”
Where do you find inspiration?
“One of my favorite things about working at the interface of biology, physics, and mathematics, is that I often find inspiration by paying attention in day-to-day life and constantly asking why things are the way they are, how they could be different, and how those questions could translate into mathematics. On a more structured level, I find inspiration by attending talks and regularly discussing science with my amazing colleagues at UChicago and beyond, and by reading broadly.”
What aspects of your research could be interesting to mathematicians or applied to biology?
“Theorists are used to asking questions about how dynamical systems behave in different regimes, and there is a whole field - statistical mechanics - devoted to understanding how macroscopic phenomena emerge from interactions among many microscopic degrees of freedom. So the central problem I work on is very natural from a theory perspective.”
What about NITMB do you find exciting?
“I'm excited about the opportunity to expand my circle of colleagues in Chicago and beyond through the NITMB. My research benefits a lot from discussions with people whose expertise and interests overlap with and differ from my own, and it's really special to have a centralized institute dedicated to facilitating those kinds of interactions just ‘down the street’.”
What career achievement are you most proud of?
“I'm very happy with the PNAS paper I recently published with Sarah Cobey, ‘A speed limit on strain replacement from original antigenic sin’. We addressed an important, timely question relating immunological memory to patterns of pathogen evolution using an elegant mathematical model, and our findings are relevant to the continued evolution of SARS-CoV-2. I like that the paper has strong theoretical appeal as well as applicability to current problems that are really affecting people's day-to-day lives.”
Outside of your research, what other interests do you have?
“Outside of my research, I enjoy spending time with my one-year old daughter, and challenging myself athletically through rowing and running.”
What are you hoping to work on in the future?
“I have a lot of questions related to the dynamics of immunological memory sitting on the docket right now. I'm planning on further developing my work on early immune memories and pathogen evolution. I'm also excited about some recent experiments elucidating the cellular mechanisms by which early infections bias future immune responses, so I'd like to see how those experiments can further inform our models of host immunity. But there are other contexts where memory plays an important role in macroscopic phenomena more generally - contexts as diverse as pattern formation in embryonic development and information processing through sensory organs. I don't have any concrete plans to work on those any time soon, but I like to keep my ears open.”
The NITMB looks forward to welcoming Lauren McGough on Tuesday, August 13th as part of the Research-In-Progress meeting series. More information about Lauren McGough’s work is available on McGough’s Google Scholar page
Comments