Thomas Kainamura Pedersen

Thomas Kainamura Pedersen is a postdoctoral fellow in the MIT Department of Biological Engineering, working at the intersection of AI, computational biology, and experimental immunology to understand how antigen-specific T cell responses shape human health and disease. He studies how the immune system recognizes microbial and disease-associated antigens and how these interactions can be leveraged to design more effective immunotherapies and vaccines. During his doctoral studies, Thomas developed computational and experimental approaches to identify immunodominant microbiome- derived antigens and characterize their corresponding T cell responses at single-cell resolution. His work revealed how immune responses to a common gut microbial epitope shift from tolerance to inflammation in inflammatory bowel disease and led to the discovery of a novel microbiome-reactive Th17 cell subset associated with intestinal pathology. As an MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellow, Thomas will develop generative AI tools and multimodal computational models to quantify antigen presentation at single-cell resolution and uncover the cellular programs that govern effective immune activation. His work could improve the design of vaccines and immunotherapies by enabling more precise prediction of immune responses.