The Outstanding Recent Graduate Award recognizes the noteworthy and distinctive achievements of an individual who has graduated from the Scholars Program within the last two years. The honoree embodies the values of scientific innovation and collaboration leading to seminal biomedical discoveries at an early stage in their career.
This year’s nominees were: Aaron Bernstein, David Cruz Walma, Matthew Mulè, Olive Jung, and Sean Corcoran.
We are thrilled to announce that the 2024 Outstanding Recent Graduate Award is presented to:
Dr. Matthew Mulè
Matt conducted his PhD research under the guidance of John Tsang (NIH/Yale) and Ken Smith (Cambridge), making significant contributions to systems immunology. He developed the first computational framework dedicated to denoising single-cell protein expression data from multimodal single-cell technologies—a groundbreaking achievement that combined experimental insights with computational ingenuity. Matt also ensured the software, named “dsb,” was accessible to the community, complete with excellent documentation. As a result, the package has been widely adopted and cited in over 100 high-profile publications.
In addition to this, Matt led two other significant projects:
- He developed a multi-level framework to integrate human and single-cell variations, revealing a naturally adjuvanted baseline immune state in humans that predicts better vaccine responses.
- He integrated single-cell data with clinical information, discovering that iron dysregulation and inflammatory stress are linked to poor long-term outcomes in COVID-19 patients.
Matt has another paper under revision, where he uses multimodal single-cell analysis to identify a baseline predictor of adverse outcomes to cancer immunotherapy. As a superb MD-PhD student and a rising star in systems immunology, Matt is truly deserving of this award.
Currently completing his medical training at UNC, Matt was unable to join us for the Colloquium.
Congratulations, Dr. Matthew Mulè, on this well-deserved honor!