Nicholas C. Wu

Nicholas C. Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), affiliated with the School of Molecular & Cellular Biology. He holds additional campus affiliations with the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Microbial Systems Initiative, and the Cancer Center at Illinois. His research focuses on immunology, virology, molecular evolution, and protein structure, with a particular emphasis on influenza and SARS-CoV-2 viruses. He employs techniques like deep mutational scanning, cryo-EM, and machine learning to study viral evolution, antibody specificity, and vaccine design.

Wu completed his B.S. at the University of Virginia (2010), Ph.D. at UCLA (2015), and a postdoc at The Scripps Research Institute (2020). He has received numerous awards, including the Vallee Scholar Award (2024), Searle Scholar Award (2022), and NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2021). His work has been published in high-impact journals like Immunity, Cell Host & Microbe, and Science.

Research interests include viral immune evasion mechanisms, antibody-antigen interactions, and the development of predictive models for vaccine design. His lab’s projects aim to leverage evolutionary principles and structural biology to improve public health responses to emerging pathogens.

Key achievements include identifying conserved epitopes in influenza neuraminidase, developing an explainable AI model for antibody specificity prediction, and discovering structural constraints in SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. Collaborations span virology, bioinformatics, and structural biology, with a focus on translational applications.