The Ogbunu Lab @ Yale is focused on effective interactions that craft disease at the level of genes, proteins, cells, and societies.
We are a question-focused group. That is, we are not confined to a single organism, taxa, or disease type (though we mostly focus on microbes and infectious disease).
Pirmary keywords: evolutionary systems biology, complex systems, disease evolution and ecology, population genetics, epidemiology, evolutionary medicine
Secondary keywords: science & society, data & ethics, complex social systems, information, futurism, technology
methods: computational biology, experimental evolution, experimental biochemistry & biophysics, mathematical modeling, simulations, evolutionary computation, data science, AI
Fundamentally, we offer that the natural world is defined by complex interactions between biological agents and the environment.
We study interactions across scales, from the population level to the molecular level.
Interactions between genes and environments.
Between pathogens, hosts and environments.
Between environments and pathogens and hosts.
Between society and structures.
We ask questions that are simultaneously relevant for the study of disease (and potential treatment and prevention regimen), and for theoretical questions in medicine, evolutionary biology, ecology, and society.
In this sense, we aim to establish a bi-directional relationship between theory and disease: Theory allows us to ask important questions about disease, and disease systems provide great models for asking basic questions about how systems (genetic, epidemiological, social) evolve and change.
Importantly, we extend our definiton of “disease” to social ills, phenomena that negatively effect society. In this sense, our work examines social inequality, discrimination, and misinformation.
For more details check research areas.