Meet the FAS faculty: Brandon Ogbunu

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What is there to be discovered at the intersection of fields as diverse as science, society, and culture?  

That’s the question Brandon Ogbunu (‘10 PhD) is probing with his research, as he explores—and breaks down—the boundaries between scientists and society.

Ogbunu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), where he conducts research on disease evolution. Ogbunu’s research utilizes a variety of skillsets from synthetic chemistry to mathematical epidemiology, the study of disease trends and patterns.  

His lab is focused on “evolvability”—the capacity of diseases and pathogens to evolve—and is working on creating fundamental rules and proof to categorize whether certain pathogens are evolvable. His team seeks to answer questions about pathogens’ capacity to evolve using mathematical epidemiology, experimental evolution, molecular biology, and computational biology.

For Ogbunu, mixing fields together is part of the thrill of his research.

“A lot of the barriers we have—be they between biology and chemistry, evolutionary biology and molecular biology, or English and comparative lit—are arbitrary. Those are not real barriers. Those are historical barriers, and I like in this job being able to break down barriers and get different fields talking to each other.” He credits his department for their supportive and accepting demeanor, which allows him to weave interdisciplinary aspects into his research.

Prior to Yale, Obgunu held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical research center based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University for two years before joining Yale in 2020. He has received awards including the UNCF-Merck Science Initiative, the Broad Institute Diversity Fellowship, and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Earlier this year Ogbunu received the 2023-2024 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research from Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The award recognizes outstanding research conducted by ladder faculty members in the social or natural sciences who are untenured at the time that the work is completed or published.

Ogbunu said that he was “shocked” when he received the email notifying him of the prize. “There have been so many esteemed winners in the past,” he said of the news. “To be amongst those winners is truly humbling.” 

Rethinking disease and society

Growing up in New York City during the HIV epidemic, Ogbunu's interest in disease was heightened. He was attracted to interdisciplinary fields, such as history and computer science, that allowed him to think about disease spread in interesting, creative ways. “I’ve loved taking diverse approaches to thinking about big problems."  

Beyond learning about disease etiology on a microscopic level, Ogbunu is also analyzing population health by incorporating pedagogies like social determinants of health and health inequalities. While mathematical epidemiology has given people a toolset to analyze disease, it ignores social factors such as structural inequalities and unequal healthcare access.  

As such, Ogbunu seeks to take the “classical canon of epidemiology and mathematical epidemiology” and apply those findings on a sociological level to illustrate problems such as health and racial disparities. Formulas used to describe disease—such as the R0, or the basic reproductive ratio of a pathogen—often fail to take into account social inequities, he explained. The reproductive ratio of influenza, for example, can vary in different settings, such as Native American reservations, incarceration facilities, and schools.  

“A lot of the computational tools that we use make blanket statements. They kind of assume a population has a certain structure. What we’re doing is saying ‘no.’ Society has much more heterogeneity, is much more unequal, and so you need to change the mathematical and computational tools to accommodate and incorporate these issues so that we can better model these diseases.”

Another interest he’s investigating is zoonotic diseases, which are transmitted from animals to humans and vice versa. Amongst his lab members is an avian disease ecologist named Andrea Ayala, Postdoctoral Fellow of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, who is interested in pathogen emergence and spillover into novel hosts, specifically the Vibrio spp. system in waterfowl of Florida. 

Mentorship and 'democratizing' science

Ogbunu has spoken extensively about the impact his mentors have had on his career in features by MIT and academic journals Genome Biology and Evolution and Current Biology. He cites inspirations like his mother and his undergraduate research advisor, Vernon R. Morris, a physical chemist who coauthored Brandon's first publication and cemented his scientific vocation at Howard University.  

He also has special ties to Yale, having earned his PhD in Microbiology here in 2010, which has influenced how he teaches. Ogbunu also reflected on mentors at Yale such as Paul Turner, Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. While working in Turner’s virology lab during his doctoral studies, Ogbunu produced a dissertation on the evolvability of infectious diseases.

Joining the Yale faculty in the midst of a pandemic, his research has real world implications that he realized could be implemented in real time. “Returning to the faculty here has been a real treat because they’ve been able to treat me as a mature, independent scientist with my own interests,” he said, “and I especially appreciate how the department has allowed me to be myself.”

These culminating experiences are reflected in Ogbunu’s research, his desire to “explore the boundaries of disciplines,” and redefining “what it means to be a professor, scientist, and be at Yale.”

The pursuit of inclusivity and accessibility in science is a recurring ethos which propels Ogbunu’s work. This summer, he partnered with Jacqueline Tanaka, Associate Director of STEM Student Success for Yale Undergraduate Research, to create a funded 10-week summer research program sponsored by the National Science Foundation for formerly incarcerated undergraduate students.  

The NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Computational Analysis of Infectious Diseases incorporates faculty mentors from various departments, including the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the School of Public Health. Student interns are assigned to a graduate student mentor on a faculty team, with the program culminating in a research symposium.

In total, six student interns have been hosted in different labs across Yale. The students are working on projects related to computational biology and disease evolution and have also enrolled in computer science courses to build their foundation in computation.  

Emphasizing the benefits of education such as lower recidivism rates, improved occupational opportunities, and higher self-efficacy, Ogbunu was more than willing to be a host lab for the program.

“I believe that education and access to knowledge is a human right,” he said. “I'm pro-democratization of science and knowledge. I think it would be better if society as a whole had access to and could participate in the science process.”

Eager to bring science outside of the ivory towers of Yale into the real world, Ogbunu is invested in science communications and criminal justice system reform, publishing a paper last year in Nature about racial disparities in the legal system and their association with COVID-19. He has also been recognized for his excellence in communicating science to the public, having received a 2024 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Ogbunu also highlighted the work of the Yale Prison Education Initiative, a program hosted jointly by Yale and the University of New Haven, which provides degrees and courses to incarcerated individuals at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, in Suffield, Connecticut.  

“Yale has already established itself as a leader in education inside the walls of the prison, so hopefully we can continue to build programs like this that create opportunities for individuals once they are out,” he said. “This all part of one movement to modernize what it means to be an academic institution, what it means to be a scholar, what it means to be a teacher, and what service to the community means.” 

Ogbunu has taken on two student interns in his lab: Sabella Rica Tilghman and Ricardo Donan, both of whom were directly mentored by PhD student Ketty Kabengele.

Donan, a California native, is a first-year student at Irvine Valley College. After hearing about the REU program, Donan decided to throw his hat in the ring. He said that his biggest goal is to obtain his PhD, in part because he wants to “create stability for my family and generational wealth.”

Currently pursuing his associate's degree in science, Donan said he is thinking about majoring in engineering. He’s excited to gain hands-on lab experience in particular and hopes that the computer science and computational skills he’s gained during this internship will transfer to both his studies and future jobs. “Just being part of these internships and being able to work with and collaborate with these professors is expanding my whole perspective,” he said.  

Navigating the space Yale was tricky at first, Donan says, especially having moved from the West Coast to the East Coast for the first time. But Ogbunu and his lab mates have made Donan feel more at home.

"I was incarcerated a year ago, so to be here is a blessing. It gives me hope that I can change and can be someone who I wasn’t before,” he said. “I just think it’s a part of God’s plan and that I’m blessed to be here.”

While the REU grant is just a pilot for now, Ogbunu said that he hopes to continue the program next summer. He would love to institutionalize the program and make it a staple that the university continues to offer.  

“I like to break down walls between the university and the community by bringing people in. Including people in things is one of the most exciting parts of this job, whether that be other scientific disciplines or communities who’ve been disenfranchised.”