Ivelin Georgiev, PhD

Dr. Georgiev received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University. In 2009 he joined the newly formed Structural Bioinformatics Core Section at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) on the main NIH campus in Bethesda, MD, where he served as a staff scientist and co-head until 2015. Dr. Georgiev is now a faculty member at the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center and an Associate Professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology and of Computer Science at Vanderbilt. Dr. Georgiev is the founding Director of the Vanderbilt Program in Computational Microbiology and Immunology.

At the interface of immunology and virology, recent computational advances have allowed us to better understand the interactions between antibodies and antigen, to design immunogens capable of eliciting target antibody specificities, and to optimize antibodies as clinical products. Research efforts in the Georgiev laboratory aim to utilize the power of computation to increase our understanding of fundamental questions in immunology and virology and to develop novel ways of using this understanding to fight diseases. For the translational component of our research, we apply structure-based protein design approaches to the development of new vaccine and antibody product candidates against a number of viruses of biomedical interest.