On November 27, Europe Bailey Doan of the Tedder Lab successfully defended her dissertation entitled, "Patterns of Autoantibody Expression in Multiple Sclerosis and Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Revealed Through the Development of an Autoantigen Discovery Technology".
Her dissertation work studying human autoimmunity involved Next Generation Sequencing, which provided billions of data points. Europe realized quickly the importance of bioinformatics and biostatistics in interpreting data and building useful models of disease and disease outcomes.
For next steps, Dr. Doan plans to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship focused on bioinformatics training in a human immunology setting in order to contribute to the growing need for analyzing and interpreting large complex datasets in the field of immunology.