Research Philosophy

The focus of the Lareau Lab is to understand how cells in our bodies adapt, expand, and evolve during the course of our lives, particularly in the immune system. The theme of our lab’s research is Computational and Translational Immunology, which is purposefully broad but grounds our research program in these tenets:

Each of our studies develops or utilizes advanced computational methods to discern patterns from large datasets, typically generated from genomics sequencing.
Inspired by the promise and demonstrated efficacy of immunotherapies, we focus our research to understand and manipulate properties of immune and hematopoietic cells.
We ask questions with translational relevance in mind. These may be derived from a specific clinical observation or framed to study a biological principle that may underlie disease or response to therapy.

We are particularly interested in how somatic evolution—the collection of mutations, infections, and exposures to therapies that humans experience over a lifetime—reshapes fundamental cellular processes in the immune system.

To conduct our work, our group develops and applies computational methods and genomics-based technologies. We specialize in utilizing single-cell multi-omics approaches that profile multiple orthogonal properties of the same cells, including cell state (i.e. accessible chromatin, RNA, and protein) as well as cell lineage (i.e. somatic mtDNA and nuclear mutations). In addition to resolving the functional heterogeneity of immune cells throughout the body, we hope to help translate our basic observations into safer and more efficacious cancer immunotherapies.