Andrew Yates is a Professor of Pathology & Cell Biology and a member of the Data Science Institute and of the Program for Mathematical Genomics at Columbia University. Andrew got his PhD in Theoretical Physics and Cosmology in 1996 at Imperial College London and became a quantitative immunologist soon after. His research integrates theoretical and computational tools with diverse experimental approaches to study the dynamics of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are key components of vertebrate immune systems. His group's aim is to develop a mechanistic understanding of the rules underlying the development of lymphocytes, how they behave in response to infectious challenge, and what determines the persistence of immune memory. Their philosophy is to confront and break mathematical models with data to search for parsimonious, robust, and quantitative explanations of immunological phenomena. Currently, they focus on the establishment and maintenance of T cell repertoires throughout an individual's lifespan, developing methods for inferring the phenotypic structure and dynamics of cell populations from high-dimensional data, and studying the ecology of T cells that reside in tissues throughout the body.
