Research Interests My group is interested in the identification of functional variation in two major contexts: the adaptive immune system and genetic association studies. In the adaptive immune system we have developed tools to extract and sequence millions of somatically rearranged t-cell receptor sequences from a specimen, and we are pursuing the application of this technology in several arenas, including the process of breaking tolerance in autoimmune disease, the process of developing protective immunity after vaccination, and screening for common exposures by comparing public sequences between individuals. Our other interests are largely in the arena of identifying putatively functional variation in the regions that are statistically associated with disease after GWAS studies. This includes interpretation and extension of genome-wide association studies, and the identification of functional variation that is causally related to the statistical associations observed in GWAS. In a related context, we have recently entered the field of exome sequencing, where we are assessing the enrichment of individuals from the extreme tails of phenotypic distributions for rare, putatively functional variants, in an effort to identify novel genes and pathways associated with phenotypes of interest.