Team

Principal Investigator

Jose Ordovas-Montanes, PhD

  • Jose grew up in a Spanish household within the Boston area, circling the perimeter with high school in Framingham, MA, college at Tufts University, and graduate studies in the Harvard Immunology program. During his undergraduate, Jose worked in human immunology labs at Biogen Idec, University College London, and Children’s Hospital Boston, where he focused on monogenic immune deficiencies. For his PhD work, Jose trained with Uli von Andrian, studying how the nervous system and the immune system function together as the principal sensory interfaces between the internal and external environments.

Research Faculty, Boston Children's Hospital
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
Associate Member, Broad Institute
Principal Faculty, Harvard Stem Cell Institute
jose.ordovas-montanes at childrens.harvard.edu

Postdoctoral Fellows

Lillian Juttukonda, MD, PhD

  • Lillian is a physician-scientist performing her fellowship research in the lab studying rhinovirus infection in infants and toddlers. She completed her MD/PhD training at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. For her PhD, she studied nutritional immunity of manganese in mouse models of acute bacterial infection in Eric Skaar’s laboratory. She then moved to Boston for pediatrics residency at Boston Children’s Hospital and is now a second year neonatology fellow in the Harvard fellowship program. She loves to hike, watch baseball, read books, and play piano.

Michael Schwoerer, PhD

  • Michael is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab interested in host-viral interactions in the lung epithelium. He seeks to understand how specific viral processes drive functional tissue-level changes, with broad implications for asthma, post-acute inflammatory sequelae, and lung regeneration. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Michael received a B.A. in Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he carried out research on how Ebola and Lassa viruses escape the host cell. He subsequently attended Princeton University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in the lab of Alexander Ploss. Michael’s graduate work focused on the extremely narrow host tropism of HCV, characterizing the species-specific effects of the interferon-stimulated gene receptor transporter protein 4 (RTP4). He is compelled by the intricacies of host-viral interactions and the ways that they can be leveraged to develop broad-spectrum therapeutics. Outside of lab, Michael enjoys distance running, opera, pub trivia, and karaoke.

Aaqib Sohail, PhD

  • Aaqib is an immunologist focused on translational research, bridging experimental biology and computational analysis to better understand human immune responses. He specializes in developing in vitro disease models, single-cell profiling, and integrating multi-omics data to uncover mechanisms of infection and inflammation.

    At Boston Children’s Hospital, he studies nasal mucosal immunity during infection using single-cell transcriptomics. Outside the lab, he enjoys bike riding, hiking, and exploring new coffee shops around Boston.

PhD Students

Peter Lotfy

  • Peter comes to the lab from Southern California, where he grew up and attended UC San Diego (UCSD) for his BS (Physiology & Neuroscience) and MS (Biology) degrees. At UCSD, Peter worked with Larry Goldstein, modeling neurodegenerative diseases in human stem cell-derived neurons and glia and developing methods for performing genome-wide CRISPR screens in these cell types. He then joined the lab of Patrick Hsu at the Salk Institute, where, as a research technician, he contributed to the metagenomic discovery, characterization, and application of novel RNA-targeting CRISPR systems.

Andrew Kwong

  • Andrew is a graduate student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program who is interested in defining how intercellular circuits are formed to maintain health and sustain inflammatory disease. Growing up in Toronto, Canada, he attended McMaster University where he majored in Biochemistry. Here, he worked with Patricia Liaw and investigated the mechanisms of neutrophil extracellular trap release and their involvement in the pathophysiology of sepsis. He spent a summer under Charlie Rice at The Rockefeller University where he explored the antiviral properties of stem cells.

Joshua De Sousa Casal

  • Josh is a grad student in the lab within the department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. Prior to coming to the United States for school, Josh grew up just outside of the city of Toronto, Canada, in the small town of Stouffville, Ontario. For his undergraduate studies, he attended the University of Toronto where he did a specialist degree in immunology. During this time, he worked in the lab of Juan Carlos Zúñiga-Pflücker, and investigated the stromal signals involved in early T cell commitment and aided in the development of a new technology for the generation of T cells from various stem cell sources.

Jaclyn Long Walsh

  • Jaclyn is a graduate student in the Harvard Immunology program and is jointly advised by Jose and Arlene Sharpe. She grew up in Massachusetts and attended Northeastern University for her undergraduate studies, where she completed degrees in Bioengineering and Biology. During her time at Northeastern, Jaclyn developed lymph node-on-a-chip models at the Wyss Institute, applied CRISPR gene editing to natural killer cell therapies at Editas Medicine, and studied CD8+ T cell dysfunction in tumors in the Sharpe Lab at HMS.

Isabelle Oliver

  • Isabelle is a Biological and Biomedical Sciences graduate student who joined the Ordovas-Montanes lab in 2023. She is broadly interested in understanding how development and morphogenesis set up patterned manifestations of inflammatory skin disease. When she isn’t in the tissue culture hood, Isabelle enjoys drawing and listening to audiobooks.

Hannah Matthews

  • Hannah is a graduate student in the Harvard Biological Sciences in Public Health program, co-mentored by Jose and Kizzmekia Corbett. She is originally from North Carolina, and she completed her undergraduate studies at UNC Chapel Hill, majoring in Environmental Health Sciences. During her time at UNC, Hannah worked in Rebecca Fry’s lab, exploring the link between hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and PFAS, and in James Samet’s lab, investigating how environmental exposures affect redox balance in the human airway.

Erica Langan

  • Erica is a Harvard-MIT MD-PhD student in the Harvard Immunology graduate program. She’s originally from Ohio, completed her B.S. in Biology with a minor in Bioinformatics at Duke University, and is now partway through completing her MD degree in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. As a PhD student, she is interested in applying computational tools to the study of chronic inflammation in epithelial tissues. Outside of lab, Erica enjoys being outdoors—running, hiking, etc—exploring Boston’s many coffee shops, and creative writing.

Research Assistants

Sydney Mullin

  • Sydney is a proud New Jersey native who graduated from Princeton University in 2024, where she studied Molecular Biology (AB) and Bioengineering (cert.). She completed her thesis work in the lab of Dr. Alexander Ploss, generating a series of reporter viruses for application to identifying the cellular reservoirs of Usutu virus (USUV) and analyzing the spatio-temporal dynamics of infection.

Jackson Larlee

  • Jackson hails from the great state of Maine and is a 2024 graduate of Tufts University with a B.S. in biology (super cool) and archaeology (also super cool). While at Tufts, he researched how population wide genomic data could be used to uncover recent demographic changes through writing simulations, as well as aiding in work on thermal tolerance in invasive marine snails. Excited to jump headfirst into inflammation, he enjoys viewing the cellular landscape as an interdependent system and is curious about how developmental pathways are informed through these complex interactions. He hopes to hone his passions and experiences en route to attaining a PhD.

Lixin Yang

  • Lixin is from North Carolina, where she graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2025 with a double major in Biology and Computer Science. She spent four years in the lab of Dr. Jason Whitmire, where she studied immune responses to viral infections, focusing on chemokine-induced T cell migration.

    Broadly, Lixin is interested in exploring how the immune system can be harnessed and engineered to treat human diseases. She looks forward to attending graduate school, where she can continue applying computational approaches to questions in immunology. Outside of the lab, Lixin loves to play piano, ice skate, and (most importantly) eat pickles.

David Ma

  • David is a Research Assistant in the lab fascinated by how molecular biology can be harnessed to unlock new insights in immunology. He is motivated by how molecular tools such as scRNA and advanced protein detection systems can illuminate mechanisms of disease
    and guide the development of new therapies. David received his B.Sc. in Honors Anatomy and Cell Biology with a minor in Computer Science from McGill University, where he investigated the role of Tubulin Polymerization Promoting Protein (TPPP) in neurodegenerative disorders using AlphaFold, TIRF microscopy, and targeted mutagenesis. He subsequently joined Affinia Therapeutics as a Research Associate, where he conducted high-throughput DNA/RNA tissue extractions, ddPCR assay development, and protein quantification to support preclinical gene therapy studies. David is driven by the intersection of biology and technology and the ways these can be harnessed to advance immune biology. Outside of the lab, he enjoys running, cooking, and new adventures.

Computational Staff

Chris Lent

  • Chris is a Research Computing Data Scientist on the NextGen project. She is originally from New York and completed her undergraduate degree in Cell and Molecular Biology with minors in Data Science and Environmental Science from Northeastern University. Interested in the intersection of the biological and computational sciences, she pursued a Master’s in Bioinformatics from Northeastern. She also brings with her previous industry experience from various co-ops with the greater Boston biotech industry. Chris is working on the data analysis and management for the project. Her work includes automating and streamlining the processing of large single-cell datasets and carrying out general data analysis and management. Outside of the lab, Chris enjoys attending live music shows, trying new arts and craft projects, exploring local vintage shops, playing puzzle games and exploring the arboretum.

Kyle Kimler

  • Kyle is an associate computational biologist with the Cell Discovery Network, where he analyzes inflamed pediatric gastrointestinal single-cell RNA sequencing data in a joint project with the Shalek and Kean Labs. Before moving to Boston, he did a MS centered at SciLifeLab in Sweden, where he sequentially worked in the Elsässer lab with unnatural amino acids, the Sonnhammer lab with networks of coexpression in spatial transcriptomics, and the Hudson lab making model chemolithoautrophic bacteria. Before that, he worked for three years in R&D Cell Bio Custom Services at Thermo Fisher. Before Thermo, he researched mosquito vision in the O’Tousa lab while doing a BS at Notre Dame.

    Kyle is looking for a deeper understanding of general cell biology, which is why he chose to move into computational biology. He is excited to work with human data, and with so many humans on a joint project. While outdoors, he loves to go aimlessly exploring, foreign and domestic, by running and biking long distances and learning languages. While indoors, he loves reading and making music.

Rose Hedderman

  • Rose is a computational biologist in the Cell Discovery Network. She is working to understand the relationship between existing cell cell communication networks affecting immune-mediated inflammatory diseases through single cell RNA-seq methods. Her work also involves equipping physician researchers to improve their computational fluency and data analysis skills for their experiments.
    Rose has Bachelors degrees in Computational Biology and Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Austin. At UT, she worked with Alexander Huth to investigate summarization models for decoding fMRI recordings from semantic tasks. She also assisted a first year PhD student in exploring spiking neural network simulators for neuromorphic hardware in Andreas Gerstlauer’s SLAM lab.
    Prior to joining the lab, Rose worked on a hardware R&D team as an AI Software Architect at HP. She researched lightweight computer vision models for edge applications through preexisting quantization techniques.

    Outside of the lab, Rose enjoys going on runs, traveling to see friends & family, attending local concerts, and hiking in national & state parks.

Matthew Morabito

  • Matt is the program coordinator for a number of Cell Discovery Network projects. His unorthodox yet impactful skill-set comes from years of experience coaching triathletes, runners and cyclists through personalized training program design, testing and data analysis. In addition to working at this comprehensive level with individual athletes, he is also the head coach of the Bentley University Triathlon Team, where he manages athletes individually but with the goal of group-synchronized results. When not coaching, he races long-course triathlon professionally.