Joe Reda

About

I've long been drawn to the immune system's capacity for protection and harm, wondering whether we can tip that balance intentionally.

That question led me from Miami to Chicago to New York, through protein engineering, computational biology, and mouse models, all in pursuit of teaching the immune system to choose tolerance in a targeted manner.

I'm currently a postdoctoral associate at NYU, working with Jeffrey Hubbell on engineering proteins that leverage efferocytic pathways to induce antigen-specific immune tolerance.

Increasingly, I work AI-augmented — building my own computational tools to make the science faster, more reproducible, and less bottlenecked by friction.

Education

Ph.D., Molecular Engineering

University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering

Advisor: Jeffrey A. Hubbell

Dissertation: Recombinant Fusions of Antigen with Mediators of Efferocytosis Modulate Antigen-Specific Immune Responses

B.S., Biomedical Engineering, Summa Cum Laude

University of Miami

High School

Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy

Technical Expertise

Wet Lab

Protein Engineering Molecular Biology Spectral Flow (25-color) Mouse Models OT-I/OT-II Systems mRNA-LNP Gene Therapy

Computational

High-dimensional Flow Analysis FlowJo R / Bioconductor Python Data Visualization

Leading the single-cell multiome and spatial-transcriptomics analysis arm of a Colton Center for Autoimmunity grant.

AI-Augmented Workflow

A heavy day-to-day user of Claude Code — not to offload thinking, but to build custom tools that remove friction from my science. I operationalized a released molecular-recognition foundation model into a working HPC pipeline for in-silico protein-interface screening, and stood up computational infrastructure across two campuses.

Claude Code HPC (Slurm) Foundation-model Application Reproducible Tooling
See tools I've built

Research Focus

My research centers on the hypothesis that efferocytosis — the process by which phagocytes clear apoptotic cells — can be leveraged to induce immunological tolerance in a targeted and antigen-specific manner.

By designing proteins that engage efferocytic pathways while presenting specific antigens, we can potentially treat autoimmune diseases and allergies without the broad immunosuppression of current therapies.