The Bimber Lab uses high throughput and high dimensional technologies to understand the immune response to infectious disease. 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.  He is also a professionally trained software developer, a skillset that is incorporated into the computational focus of his laboratory. Several current research interests are listed below:

High Dimensional and Omics Technologies to Characterize the Immune Response to Pathogens: Leaps in technology can drive our understanding of disease. Single-cell sequencing technologies have dramatically expanded in recent years, currently allowing transcriptional profiling of thousands of individual cells in a single experiment. Dr. Bimber’s lab adapts and employs these technologies to study the natural and vaccine-elicited immune response, with active projects related to HIV/SIV, tuberculosis, HBV, and malaria. He has developed many approaches specific to T cell immunity, including novel methods to isolate antigen-specific T cells, followed by high-resolution clonotypic and transcriptomic analyses. The overarching goal of these projects is to provide a more complete understanding of an effective immune response to these challenging pathogens, with the goal of informing vaccine or therapeutic design.

Precision Medicine and Non-human Primate Disease Models: The rapidly decreasing cost of genomic sequencing and the advent of precise and targeted genomic editing technologies create opportunities to understand the genetic etiology and ultimately treat a wide range of human diseases. While much attention has been given to the creation of human gene therapies, gene editing techniques, gene editing technologies will also allow scientists to create precise animals models that more closely mirror human diseases. Dr. Bimber’s work in this space involves two main areas: 1) Large-scale genetic characterization of biomedically relevant non-human primate populations, with the goal of identifying novel disease models and informing research the uses these populations. This includes the Macaque Genotype and Phenotype resource (mGAP; https://mgap.ohsu.edu), and 2) the development of molecular technologies that enable gene editing and gene therapies in non-human primate models.