Ashti Shah, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, received the Foundation of Systems Biology in Engineering (FOSBE) Young Investigator Award for her research in computational immunology. This is the first year that FOSBE and the literary publication Frontier have co-sponsored the prize, which is given to new researchers making significant contributions to the field. Along with the award, FOSBE Shah will fly to Corfu, Greece in September to accept the award and give a talk on the future of systems biology at the 10th International Federation of Automatic Control International Conference on Foundations of Systems Biology in Engineering (FOSBE 2024).

For three years, Shah has worked with her mentor Yoram Vodovotz, professor of surgery, immunology, and computational and systems biology in the School of Medicine, of bioengineering in the Swanson School of Engineering, and of clinical and translational sciences. Shah’s work focuses on how inflammation spreads through the body’s tissues for various reasons, such as infection or trauma. She has developed a set of algorithms to model the spread of inflammation that can be applied to many projects.