Michael W. Deem

Michael W. Deem works in the area of evolution, immunology, and materials. Deem has developed methods to quantify vaccine effectiveness and antigenic distance for influenza, methods to sculpt the immune system to mitigate immunodominance in dengue fever, a physical theory of the competition that allows HIV to escape from the immune system, the first exact solution of a quasispecies theory of evolution that accounts for cross-species genetic exchange, a hierarchical approach to protein molecular evolution, a `thermodynamic' formulation of evolution, and a theory for how biological modularity spontaneously arises in an evolving system. In the materials field, Deem is interested in structure, nucleation, and function of zeolites. Deem developed the widely-used DIFFAX and ZEFSA methods in this area. Deem provided the first atomistic simulations of silica nucleation under zeolite synthesis conditions and has developed a database of hypothetical zeolite frameworks that contains greater than 4 million structures.