Lindsay Cowell

Lindsay Cowell is a Professor in the Department of Population and Data Sciences at UT Southwestern Medical Center, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Immunology within the School of Biomedical Sciences. She directs research in adaptive immunity and bioinformatics, affiliated with the Immunology, Cancer Biology, and Computational and Systems Biology graduate programs.

Her educational background includes an M.S. in Biomathematics (1995) and Ph.D. in Biomathematics (2000), both from North Carolina State University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University Medical Center. She joined UT Southwestern in 2010 after serving as an Assistant Professor in Duke's Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.

Dr. Cowell's research focuses on adaptive immune receptor repertoires, leveraging high-throughput sequencing and computational methods to study immune responses in cancer, autoimmune diseases (e.g., multiple sclerosis), and infections (e.g., HIV, SARS-CoV-2). Her group develops innovative approaches for representing immune repertoires as antigen specificity landscapes and detecting diagnostic patterns. Recent work emphasizes clinical applications through projects like VDJServer and AIRR Community initiatives.

Analysis of her 15 most recent publications reveals a strong trend toward translational immunology, with significant contributions to SARS-CoV-2 complications, cancer biomarker discovery, and immune repertoire data standards. Her work bridges computational biology with clinical immunology, particularly in HPV-related cancers and autoimmune diagnostics.

As a principal investigator, she leads collaborative projects across multiple institutions and serves on editorial boards for immunoinformatics resources. Her lab maintains active involvement in the AIRR Community, driving standards for immune repertoire data sharing and analysis.