Welcome to hegroup.org!

Dr. Yongqun "Oliver" He's laboratory research group at the University of Michigan is interested in both wet-lab (microbiology and immunology lab) and dry-lab (bioinformatics lab) biomedical research. Our primary biomedical research interest is to understand pathogenesis and immunology of infectious diseases and develop vaccines against intracellular pathogens. In particular, we study Brucella, a facultative intracellular bacterium that causes zoonotic brucellosis in humans and a variety of animal species.

Our wet-lab Brucella research is focused on studying macrophage-Brucella intreactions and developing Brucella subunit vaccines. Virulent Brucella survives inside macrophages and prevents macrophage cell death, while attenated rough Brucella strains cannot survive inside macrophages and induce programmed macrophage cell death. Our research aims to elucidate the inhibition or prohibition of the programmed macrophage cell death due to the macrophage-Brucella interactions. We are also interested in applying reverse vaccinology and more effective adjuvant strategies for Brucella subunit vaccine research and development (R&D).

Our primary bioinformatics research is to develop database and analysis systems to study host-pathogen interactions and vaccines against infectious diseases, and to analyze biological networks (e.g., apoptosis) by Bayesian network modeling, microarray data analysis, and literature mining. We are also interested in biomedical ontology research including how to apply ontology into data integration and literature mining. These bioinformatics approaches have been explored to study Brucella and other infectious pathogens important for public health. 

Your suggestions and comments are welcome. Thank you.