PhD student Jane Siwek has received an F31 predoctoral fellowship from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI). Siwek is a student in the Joint Carnegie Mellon–University of Pittsburgh PhD Program in Computational Biology.  

This award will help Siwek grow as an independent researcher while developing expertise in computational biology, immunology and cardiovascular research. Her fellowship is titled “Identification of immune microniches and therapeutic targets in HFpEF using interpretable machine learning and interaction language models.” 

She will study heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), a complex systemic disease with limited effective treatments. HFpEF impairs the chambers of the heart from relaxing properly between beats. It involves a systemic inflammatory state and cardiac fibrosis. 

Throughout this project, Siwek will take a systems-level approach that combines machine learning, multi and spatial omics, and interaction language models to explore the mechanisms driving HFpEF. One of the project’s goals is developing drug-protein interaction language models to accelerate the process of creating drug therapies for HFpEF. 

Siwek’s advisors Jishnu Das and Niranjana Natarajan sponsored this research. The project will take place over the remainder of Siwek’s computational biology PhD program.  

“I am most excited to learn more about cardiovascular immunology and to see what we learn from the experimental validation of candidates from our computational analyses,” Siwek said.