Giulio Isacchini
Research Scientist

Giulio
Isacchini

Senior machine learning research scientist at Imprint Labs, building generative and unsupervised models of the adaptive immune system.

About

I develop unsupervised and generative learning methods to model immune receptor repertoires and to characterize how the adaptive immune system recognizes pathogens.

Previously a Postdoctoral Scientist at UC Berkeley and a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Leipzig, where I studied how bacterial and viral evolution drives immune evasion. I obtained my PhD jointly from ENS Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, on generative modeling of immune receptor repertoires.

Writing
Experience
2024 —
Senior Machine Learning Scientist
Imprint Labs — a focused research organization decoding disease information from immune receptor repertoires
I develop unsupervised learning methods to model immune receptor repertoires and to characterize how the adaptive immune system recognizes pathogens.
2022 — 24
Postdoctoral Scientist
UC Berkeley & University of Leipzig — lab of Oskar Hallatschek
Characterized how the evolution of bacteria and viruses leads to immune evasion, developing unsupervised methods to describe evolutionary trajectories of pathogens and predict their spread in structured populations. Supported by a Humboldt Research Fellowship.
Education
2018 — 21
PhD — Machine Learning of Immune Repertoire Interactions
Max Planck Institute (Göttingen) & ENS Paris
Applied maximum-likelihood density-ratio estimation to infer selection factors with deep neural networks, showing non-linear selection models accurately describe immune receptor distributions, and characterized T-cell repertoire differentiation during thymic development. Supervisors: Armita Nourmohammad, Thierry Mora, Aleksandra Walczak.
2016 — 18
MSc — High Energy Physics
ETH Zurich & École Polytechnique Paris
Internships at ENS Paris (modeling retinal ganglion-cell spiking with deep CNNs) and CERN (gradient-boosted decision trees with a quantile loss to calibrate MC simulations of photon shower shapes in the CMS detector).
2013 — 16
BSc — Physics
Università di Trento, Italy — 110/110 e Lode (with honors)
Physics honors program; student representative in the Department of Physics council. One-year Erasmus at UiO, Oslo. CERN internship on the ATLAS@Home project.
Publications
2026
Rawat, Shapiro, Peters, Widrich, Mayer-Blackwell, Motwani, Pavlović, Al Hajj, Posgai, Kanduri, Isacchini, Chernigovskaya, Scheffer, Motwani, Balzano-Nogueira, Pettenger-Willey, Valkiers, Jacobsen, Haller, Schatz, Wasserfall, Emerson, Fiore-Gartland, Atkinson, Klambauer, Sandve, Greiff, Brusko.
Science Advances 12, eadx7448
2024
O'Donnell, Kanduri, Isacchini, Limenitakis, Brachman, Alvarez, Haff, Sandve, Greiff.
Cell Systems 15, 1168–1189
2024
Isacchini, Quiniou, Barennes, Mhanna, Vantomme, Stys, Mariotti-Ferrandiz, Klatzmann, Walczak, Mora, Nourmohammad.
PRX Life 2, 013011
2022
Isacchini, Spisak, Nourmohammad, Mora, Walczak.
Physical Review E 105, 055309
2021
Isacchini, Walczak, Mora, Nourmohammad.
PNAS 118 (14), e2023141118
2021
Montague, Lv, Otwinowski, DeWitt, Isacchini, Yip, Ng, Tsang, Yuan, Liu, Wilson, Peiris, Wu, Nourmohammad, Mok.
Cell Reports 35 (8), 109173
2020
Isacchini, Sethna, Elhanati, Nourmohammad, Walczak, Mora.
Physical Review E 101 (6), 062414
2020
Isacchini, Olivares, Nourmohammad, Walczak, Mora.
Bioinformatics, btaa574
2020
Sethna, Isacchini, Dupic, Mora, Walczak, Elhanati.
PLOS Computational Biology 16 (12), e1008394
2017
Moosavi, Isacchini.
PLOS ONE 12 (10), e0186746
2017
Adam-Bourdarios, Bianchi, Cameron, Filipčič, Isacchini, Lançon, Wu, for the ATLAS Collaboration.
J. Physics: Conference Series 898, 052009