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Meet our new Pasteur - Oxford PhD Student
In October 2025, Tyler Clabby joined the Institut Pasteur Paris campus from New York University to start his Pasteur-Oxford PhD.
Tyler's research explores how plants and fungi defend themselves against disease by studying ancient immune “sensor” proteins, helping us understand the origins of immunity. Tyler's hopes to use this knowledge to better understand immunity and its impacts on health, disease, and food security today.
Tyler Clabby
I am a PhD candidate in the Pasteur-Paris University International doctoral program, where I study the origins of immunity through a mix of cutting edge computational techniques and laboratory experiments under the guidance of Aude Bernheim and Jean Cury. Having moved to Paris from New York City, I am eager to join the international spirit of Institut Pasteur and the University of Oxford.
After completing my master’s degree in Biology at New York University, I served as the project manager in the Bioinformatics and Sequencing departments at the New York City Public Health Lab where I worked to onboard new pathogens for genomic surveillance and outbreak investigations. Genomic surveillance is identifying genetic changes to pathogens to track their spread and evolution. I learned a lot of important skills while navigating the complexities of public health and city government. I was inspired to join Institut Pasteur because of its commitment to advancing science and public health. My background in genomic surveillance has made me feel right at home in the Genomes and Genetics department at Pasteur.
The Project
My project at Pasteur builds upon my foundation in evolution but focuses on evolution across deep time instead of the short term seen with outbreak investigations. All living things have ways to defend themselves from infection. NLRs are proteins which act as sensors within a cell that detect the self vs. the invader. NLRs are a type of security system found in bacteria, fungi, plants and even humans. My project at Pasteur seeks to understand the diversity of NLRs and their building blocks in fungi. By understanding the building blocks of NLRs, we can compare them to other organisms like plants to uncover previously uncharacterized NLRs and piece together how the immune system has evolved over deep time. Fungi and plants share the absence of an adaptive immune system and therefore rely on innate immunity, with NLRs playing a key role in defense. The laboratory of professor Eunyoung Chae in the Department of Biology at Oxford University studies autoimmunity in plants with a particular interest in the evolution of autoimmunity. They have all the tools of wet lab and dry lab to compare the role of NLRs between our two disparate domains of life– plants and fungi.
My collaboration with the University of Oxford will translate my work at Pasteur on fungi into plants. Understanding these systems can help lay the groundwork for future research like understanding the origins of autoimmunity, improve how we protect crops from disease, or even inspire new biotech tools. By studying how plants and fungi can fight off threats, we learn more about immunity and its impacts on health, disease, and food security today.
