Recent UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Jonathan Carlson has received the 2009 University of Washington Graduate School Distinguished Dissertation Award. Carlson’s thesis work on “Phylogenetic Dependency Networks: Inferring Patterns of Adaptation in HIV,” co-supervised by Larry Ruzzo of UW CSE and David Heckerman of Microsoft Research, seeks to enable improved HIV vaccines by identifying HIV adaptations that the virus employs against the immune system. Carlson now works with Heckerman in the Microsoft Research eScience Group in Los Angeles.
