Computational biologist

Institut Roche, Paris

Trained in mathematics and physics, Jonathan Desponds has been applying quantitative methods to biological and biomedical research since his PhD at ENS in Paris, with applications in the fields of developmental biology, immunology and immuno-oncology. He has worked as postdoctoral scholar at the physics department of UC San Diego and as a fellow at the NSF-Simons center for quantitative biology at Northwestern University. He then joined the Health Data Hub, a French national initiative to gather and link health datasets in the interest of research, as a scientific project manager. Since Octobre 2021, he has been working at Institut Roche, in Paris, to develop and improve cancer immunotherapies. 

He has experience applying methods from statistics, probability theory, statistical mechanics and machine learning to inference and modeling of diverse biological processes. Those processes include: transcription regulation, cellular decision-making, selection of adaptive immune cells,spatial organization of developing organisms, population dynamics of immune repertoires and response to cancer immunotherapy.