For John Paul Barton, NIH-Funded Vaccine Research Is Personal

By Alison Cooley

John Paul Barton, an associate professor in Pitt Medicine’s Department of Computational and Systems Biology, recently won the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has personal connections to his work in vaccine research—he lost his uncle, his namesake, to polio. And his father and another uncle contracted polio as children, leaving his uncle partially paralyzed.

“It wasn’t an original motivation for getting into this area, but now it’s great to have the opportunity to work on problems that address the same issues that happened with my family and many people across the world—to be able to think about ways to fight infectious disease,” he said. “That makes the work more meaningful.”

Despite this personal connection, Barton didn’t set out to become a vaccine researcher.

“It was a very long path to get here. I didn’t really jump into computational biology, or actually even biology at all right away,” he said.

Barton began studying physics and math before transitioning to statistical physics. He developed relevant quantitative skills under Joel Lebowitz while earning his PhD at Rutgers University. Then, he further developed those skills during his postdoctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Arup Chakraborty, who greatly influenced Barton’s work in quantitative immunology.

Barton and the five graduate students in his lab focus on modeling evolution and immune responses. One ongoing project aims to predict which virus variants will be dominant six to 12 months in the future, to inform vaccine strain selection. This could help in vaccine design for respiratory viruses like flu.

Barton’s award for his project, “Methods for quantifying selection and predicting evolutionary dynamics,” will financially support their ongoing research in this area and allow them to expand their methods for broader applications in population biology.

The group recently found a mutation in NSP4, which was statistically identified as highly impactful in SARS-CoV-2 transmission and later confirmed experimentally.

“This thing appeared in a place that we weren’t expecting it,” he said. “No one would say that this is the first place that you should look. This is really not an obvious place for having something like this. That really appeared to be impactful, but then also later experimental work showed support that this is something that could be important—affecting transmission of the virus.”

Barton said Pitt is a great place to conduct this kind of research because of its interdisciplinary and biomedical focus. He added that the strong computational and systems biology programs and Center for Systems Immunology support his quantitative immunology work. Barton also expressed hope to expand the program in the future to work on a broader range of viruses and potentially bacterial infections.

As someone who did not have a linear career path, he advises younger researchers not to be afraid to change career directions. “If you find the kind of work you’re doing unsatisfying, then I think it’s worthwhile to find your niche. In the long term, you could be more successful and also happier. So, even if it involves a change, I think it could be worthwhile,” he said.

When Barton’s not in his lab, he enjoys time with his wife, Chioun Lee, whom he met at graduate school, and his 9-year-old son, Owen. “We moved to Pittsburgh four years ago from Riverside, California and have been super happy in the community,” he said. Barton added, laughing, “Owen loves the beach, which is unfortunate, given our location. But we do get out to the beach occasionally.”