Wilfred Ndifon

Wilfred Ndifon is Professor of Theoretical Biology at AIMS, and the AIMS Network’s Director of Research. His research focuses on applying mathematical thinking and modeling to discover mechanistic insights about diverse phenomena relevant to adaptive immunity. He has advanced the mechanistic understanding of, among others, the formation of T-cell receptors via genetic recombination; the collapse of T-cell diversity in the elderly; immune evasion by influenza viruses; the original antigenic sin; and hemagglutination-inhibition. Other research topics that interest him include theory-driven machine learning as an aid to inductive inference and prediction in biology and medicine; quantization of health; and phenotype accessibility in evolutionary landscapes. He also investigates translational applications of insights obtained from the basic scientific work. Wilfred did his Master’s (Sep 2005 – Jun 2007) and PhD (Feb 2008 – Apr 2009) studies in theoretical biology at Princeton University, USA. He subsequently took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, before returning to Africa to contribute to research and capacity building on the continent. He is training (or has trained) five PhD students and 10 Master’s students. He is an adviser to the World Health Organization and to the 100 Questions Initiative at New York University, USA.