Mihaela Oprea
Postdoctoral Fellow
Theoretical Biology and Biophysics
Los Alamos National Laboratory
MS K-710
Los Alamos, NM 87545 USA
mihaela@t10.lanl.gov

What I do now...

Co-organize the workshop on Mutability: Coevolution of Genes and Diversification Mechanisms

More generally, I work on computational models for studying

immune response dynamics
evolution of immune receptor libraries
neutral evolution
evolution of mutational robustness.

What I did before...

Medicine - University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timisoara, Romania. I used to like preclinical fields like physiology and pathologic physiology.

Computer Science -University of New Mexico ,Albuquerque, New Mexico. My thesis was on pathogen recognition by antibody repertoires, exploring the evolution of antibody gene libraries, genetic plasticity of antibodies under somatic hypermutation, the nature of the hypermutation mechanism, and mutation rate estimation methods ( .pdf version of it).

People on my modeling scene

Here are the groups and people that I interact with

Adaptive computation group at UNM, there's a lot going on there, check out the web page of my advisor, Stephanie Forrest , for a summary.
Theoretical Biology and Biophysics at LANL.
Thomas Kepler at North Carolina State University.
Bioinformatics group at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

Publications

evolutions of immune receptor libraries
dynamics of antibody immune responses
genetic plasticity of antibody genes under somatic hypermutation
mutation rate estimation

Coming up

codon bias related to mutational biases in human genes
similarity of somatic hypermutation and meiotic mutation patterns
improved methods for mutation rate estimation

Otherwise

Work in progress (for those who might have something to do with it)

mihaela@santafe.edu