Dr. Cowell received a MS in Biomathematics with a minor in Mathematics in 1995 from North Carolina State University.  In 2000, she received a PhD in Biomathematics with a minor in Immunology, also from North Carolina State University.  She spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Immunology at Duke University Medical Center and then became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.  She was also on the gratduate faculty for the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Graduate Program. In September 2010, she joined the Biomedical Informatics Division in the Department of Clinical Sciences at UT Southwestern.

Dr. Cowell has built a research program focused on the development of bioinformatics and computational biology methods for the study of the immune system and infectious diseases.  In particular, her work has focussed on the somatic diversification of antigen receptor-encoding genes and the development of computable representations of biological and clinical information.  Within each of these areas, she has developed projects that emphasize methodologic development as well as projects focused on answering specific biological questions. 

Dr. Cowell’s research on the somatic diversification of antigen receptor-encoding genes has included projects focused on:

• the somatic hypermutation of immunoglobulin genes,
• receptor editing of immunoglobulin genes, and
• V(D)J recombination.

Her group is currently developing a suite of computational methods for the analysis of antigen receptor repertoires in the context of a variety of disease types, with a current focus on multiple sclerosis. The group is developing RepServer, a web-accessible repertoire analysis server. RepServer will provide a data management infrastructure and a suite of interoperable repertoire analysis tools with an interface that allows users to upload a set of sequences and pass them through a seamless workflow that executes all steps in the analysis and generates an analysis report complete with data summary tables, statistical analyses, figures, and workflow logs.  This project is a collaboration with Dr. Nancy Monson and Richard Scheuermann at UTSW.

Dr. Cowell’s research on the development of computable representations of biological and clinical information has focused on developing methods for the representation of qualitative descriptions of immune responses and infectious diseases and for the use of such representations to enhance algorithms for the analysis of high-throughput data, for the integration of data from disparate resources, and for logical inferencing.  Specific projects within this area have included:

• the development of a method for representing cell types that is optimized for the analysis of flow cytometry data,
• application of the method to the representation of cells of hematopoietic lineage,
• the development of an Infectious Disease Ontology,
• the development of an extension to the Infectious Disease Ontology for Staphylococcus aureus infections,
• application of the S. aureus ontology to the development of procedures for the automatic generation and versioning of case report forms,
• application of the S. aureus ontology to the design of databases and data integration procedures for the integration of data from studies on the role of bacterial virulence.