Yana Safonova is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include open problems in computational immunology, including adaptive immune systems, understanding successes and failures of immune responses, and predicting the efficacy of immunizations.
She received her BS and MS in computer science from the Nizhny Novgorod State University, Russia in 2012, and her PhD in bioinformatics from the Saint Petersburg State University, Russia in 2017. In 2017, she joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) as a postdoctoral scholar. From 2019 to 2020, she was also affiliated with the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Louisville School of Medicine as a visiting postdoctoral fellow.
In 2017, Safonova was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in data science 2017 by UCSD and an Intersect Fellowship for Computational Scientists and Immunologists (2019) by the American Associations of Immunologists. She is a member of the the Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) Community of the Antibody Society.
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Yana Safonova has been accepted to the 2022 Interstellar Initiative workshop.
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Scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Scripps Research have characterized 30 antibodies that recognize a wide range of coronaviruses - a step toward the next generation of coronavirus vaccines, which may help defend against a broader swath of viruses than current vaccines.
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In largest personalized immunogenetics study to date, computer scientist Yana Safonova discovers the DNA sequences that control vaccine response in cows, opening the door for further immunogenetics research in humans.