Joao Ascensao

I study genotype-phenotype maps and evolutionary dynamics using a combination of high-throughput experimental tools and statistical/mathematical models. These days, I’m interested in immune repertoires and influenza/HIV-specific antibodies.

I’m currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, working in the Desai Lab with support from a CFAR scholar award. I'm generally curious about how we can understand the extremely high-dimensional and nonlinear genotype-phenotype landscapes of adaptive immune receptors, and what those landscapes imply about adaptive immunity.

Before Harvard, I received my PhD with Oskar Hallatschek at UC Berkeley, training at the interface of population genetics, biophysics, and molecular biology. My graduate research spanned the stochastic dynamics of microbial populations, experimental evolution, and ecological diversification, and was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a Berkeley Fellowship, and two departmental awards. Before Berkeley, I was a Fulbright and Whitaker scholar in Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo’s lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and earned a BS in Bioengineering from Rice University.