Lu Lab
Principal Investigator: Guoyu Lu
Institution: Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)
Primary Subfield: Computational Biology
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Summary HIV immune escape remains the central obstacle to durable viral control, vaccine development, and the eradication of the latent reservoir. Despite the accumulation of extensive viral sequence and immunological data, the field faces a critical epistemic bottleneck: the lack of a rigorous computational framework capable of distinguishing universal, robust escape mechanisms from the noise of subtype-specific sampling and cohort bias. Consequently, reported escape signatures often fail to generalize across HIV’s extraordinary genetic diversity, leaving researchers with fragmented, non-reproducible findings that are difficult to translate into rational immunogen design or cure strategies. This project addresses this crisis by redefining HIV immune escape analysis as “Generalization-First” science, treating robustness and uncertainty not as post-hoc checks, but as primary scientific endpoints essential for identifying biological invariants. To achieve this, we propose a staged, uncertainty-aware framework that transforms immune escape research from retrospective observation to predictive in silico experimentation. Aim 1 will construct a foundational computational substrate, deliv…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01AI203609-01: Computational Dissection of HIV Immune Escape Across Viral Diversity (2026)
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