Sai Reddy, PhD

Associate Professor of Systems and Synthetic Immunology at ETH Zurich

Speaker

Sai Reddy is an Associate Professor of Systems and Synthetic Immunology at ETH Zurich in the Department of Biosystems Science & Engineering (D-BSSE, Basel, Switzerland). He is the principal investigator of the Laboratory for Systems and Synthetic Immunology. Systems immunology uses quantitative measurements, computational biology and machine learning to describe and understand the complexity of the immune system. His group has developed a number of methods in systems immunology to greater understand adaptive immunity, in particular with a focus on antibody repertoire sequencing and analysis. Synthetic immunology is based on using methods in molecular and cellular engineering to control immune cell function and behavior. His group has established methods to reprogram immune cells for applications in directed evolution and cellular immunotherapy, with an emphasis on engineering the immunogenome.

In September 2018 Prof. Reddy was appointed Vice Director of the external pageBotnar Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH)call_made whose aim is to conduct use-inspired cutting-edge research that will improve the health and wellbeing of children and adolescents worldwide.

Prof. Reddy holds B.S. (2003) and M.S. (2004) degrees from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, USA) in Biomedical Engineering. He completed his Ph.D. thesis at Ecolé Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Bioengineering and Biotechnology in 2008 under the supervision of Prof. Melody Swartz and Prof. Jeffrey Hubbell; his research was centered on developing a novel nanoparticle vaccine technology, of which he was awarded KPMG tomorrow’s market award in 2007. Prof. Reddy moved to University of Texas, Austin (USA) under the supervision of Prof. George Georgiou for his post-doctoral fellowship (2008), where he worked on protein and antibody engineering. His work was exemplified by a technology he co-developed on monoclonal antibody discovery without screening, which combined high-throughput DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, and synthetic biology and importantly, demonstrated how systems and synthetic immunology can impact biotechnology.