Michael W Deem
Deem is known for work in evolution, vaccines and immunology, parallel tempering and statistical mechanics, and materials. He 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, an 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, a theory for how biological modularity spontaneously arises in an evolving system, and elucidated how static and dynamic measures of human brain connectivity predict complementary aspects of human cognitive performance. In the materials field, he developed the widely-used DIFFAX and ZEFSA methods for zeolites. He developed a database of hypothetical zeolite frameworks that contains greater than 4 million structures. He developed methods to design structure directing agents for zeolites, leading to among other results the first synthesis of a pure chiral zeolite enantiomorph.