Corey Watson
University of Louisville, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
Corey Watson is an Assistant professor in the Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics Department at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. He has a range of both experimental and bioinformatic experience, with expertise in genomics, epigenetics, molecular biology and evolutionary genetics. Much of his work has focused on investigating the role of complex and highly variable duplicated gene families in phenotypic variation, including work specifically on immune loci such as immunoglobulins (IG) and T cell receptor (TCR) genes. The main thrust of his lab is focused on characterizing variation in IG repertoires and associated functional responses of B cells in disease and clinical phenotypes. His most significant contribution in this area includes the largest sequencing effort in the human IG regions conducted to date, including the first descriptions of complete IG haplotypes and structural variation at nucleotide resolution, which now serve as the primary representations of the IG loci in the human genome assembly. Building on these data, he is pioneering long-read sequencing methods to improve genomic resources for the IG regions for many species, as well as profile population-level IG genetic variation to better understand antibody repertoire dynamics and B cell function, with implications for infection, autoimmunity, cancer, and vaccine/treatment response. His currently funded projects include the characterization of IG haplotype diversity from >3500 human donors from across the globe, as well as large outbred populations of non-human primates.
The purpose of his stay is to contribute to student supervision and discuss ongoing and future projects in the various research labs. Apart from visiting the labs, Corey will give two talks at Rikshospitalet on June 6 and June 7.
For more information, please visit the University of Louisville's web page about Watson's research.