Benjamin Bimber, Ph.D. joined OHSU in 2012.  His research focuses on the influence of genetics on infectious disease and the immune response, with an emphasis on using new technologies to drive understanding.  Most of his work is designed to understand how the immune system responds to HIV, a global disease with more than 30 million people actively infected worldwide.  His work has included high-resolution sequencing of HIV, and the study of complex families of immune receptors that associate with protection from HIV infection.  Most recently, Dr. Bimber is focused on understanding non-classical T-cells induced by some candidate HIV vaccines using single-cell sequencing and characterization of T-cell receptor diversity.

As a member of the ONPRC Primate Genetics Program, Dr. Bimber is also involved in efforts to promote genomics research using macaques.  He is a member of a project that is conducting large-scale whole-genome sequencing of the ONPRC macaque colony, ultimately providing data from more than 2000 subjects.  These data, along with clinical histories will be made publically available.  He is very interested in ensuring both the data from this project and infrastructure required to analyze data of this scale are available to a range of scientists, including those who may not be genetics or bioinformatics experts.

Dr. Bimber graduated in 2004 from Kalamazoo College with a B.A. in Biology, and received his Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2009 from the University of Wisconsin.  Prior to joining research faculty at OHSU, he led efforts to develop a modern research-oriented health record system at both the Wisconsin and Oregon National Primate Research Centers.  This open source system, based on LabKey Server, is now in use at five NIH Primate Centers and continues to expand.