I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, having recently completed my Ph.D. in Chemical and Physical Biology at Vanderbilt University. My research is at the intersection of computational biology, immunology, and machine learning, with a focus on developing more effective vaccines and antibody therapeutics. I analyze large-scale immune receptor sequence and structural data to advance antibody discovery and characterize B cell receptor repertoires.
My primary research interests include:
- Developing and applying machine learning models, particularly large language models, for antibody discovery and B cell receptor repertoire analysis.
- Understanding the features relevant to immunological convergence and immunogenicity
- Developing broad vaccines
- Engineering proteins
Here are some of the key projects I have led:
1. pan-betacov-S2-antibody This repository contains the data and code for our 2024 Structure publication on the discovery and characterization of the pan-betacoronavirus S2-apex antibody 54043-5.
2. AbLangRBD1 and AbLangPDB1 These repositories are associated with our 2025 bioRxiv preprint, "Contrastive Learning Enables Epitope Overlap Predictions for Targeted Antibody Discovery". In this work, I developed a contrastive learning framework to fine-tune antibody large language models for epitope overlap prediction.
For a complete list of my publications, please see bit.ly/holt_papers