Julian Pacheco

I'm a biomedical researcher with more than four years in HIV immunology and nonhuman primate models at OHSU's Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute. Over that time I came to believe that the bottleneck on discovery was the data itself.

Every new technique we introduced generated more data, faster and at greater complexity, yet I kept watching promising questions stall because no one had the time or tools to explore what we'd already collected. The researchers I learned from saw the same problem from different angles. Dr. Lydie Trautmann first brought me into the field, Dr. Hiroshi Takata mentored me across two labs, and Dr. Afam Okoye leads the group I work with now. Even on strong teams the constraint held: our ability to measure biology had outpaced our ability to analyze it.

So I went after the other half of the toolkit, a master's in data science from Willamette University. There I built public health dashboards and data pipelines, along with statistical and machine learning models of regional affordability. That work taught me to turn large, fragmented datasets into analysis that holds up when someone else questions it or builds on it. I now apply those methods to immunology data, where the questions I care about run in more dimensions than conventional analysis can follow.

My long-term goal is translational: move discoveries from biological measurement to therapeutic development and, eventually, to patients. Immunology is where this started, but my interests run wider: I want to apply that same kind of analysis to new data types and new domains, wherever it's missing. I'll go wherever the hardest open question is.

Immunology

Data Science

Engineering

Public Health

Impact