Principal Investigator
Ashish Sharma, PhD
Assistant Professor
Pathology Advanced Translational Research Unit
Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
View Faculty Profile | Publications | LinkedIn
Ashish received his BS degree in Microbiology and Immunology, graduating in 2009, and a PhD in Experimental Medicine, graduating in 2016, from the University of British Columbia (UBC). His PhD work, under the supervision of Dr. Pascal Lavoie - a clinician scientist at the British Columbia Children’s Hospital, was focused on an array of projects in the field of neonatal immunology. These projects were aimed at understanding the development of the human immune system during gestation and its impact of neonatal morbidities. Ashish was involved in projects aimed at investigating both the adaptive (T cells, NKT cells at birth) and innate (monocyte transcriptomics and inflammasome activation) arms of the neonatal immune system using basic cell biology and systems levels approaches. Ashish then pursued his post-doctoral studies under the mentorship of Dr. Rafick-Pierre Sekaly at Case Western Reserve University from 2017 to 2020. Here, his work was focused on using wet-lab and systems informatics approaches to model ex vivo human or non-human primate to understand infectious disease progression (HIV, HBV), success of cell therapies in Cancer/HIV (like CAR-T cells) and development of the neonatal immune system (and association with bacterial sepsis, influenza and RSV).
At the end of 2020, Ashish accepted a position as an instructor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at Emory University (PATRU). Here, he continues to be focused on applying systems immunology approaches to understand infectious disease progression and the success of vaccines/immunotherapeutics. The advent of high-throughput cellular and molecular profiling techniques has enhanced our ability to understand human health, disease progression and development of therapeutics. In the long-term goal, Ashish hopes to use the power of systems biology to identify immune mechanisms that drive disease progression or therapeutic outcomes at per-individual and population levels, with the ultimate goal of making research translational.
Sharma Lab Members
Mojahidul Islam, PhD
Post Doctoral Fellow
Pathology Advanced Translational Research Unit
Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
Dr. Mojahidul Islam began his scientific journey with an M.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Delhi, where he cultivated a strong foundation in molecular biology, immunology, and host-pathogen interactions. His early research fellowships at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) further deepened his interest in translational immunology and set the stage for a career focused on infectious disease research.He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (Immunology) from the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS), New Delhi, India under the supervision of Prof. Nirupma Trehanpati and Prof. Shiv Kumar Sarin. His doctoral work explored the immune and epigenetic mechanisms underlying hepatitis B virus (HBV) reactivation and seroconversion, identifying critical immunometabolic regulators and transcriptional signatures associated with disease progression and immune failure. His research also contributed to understanding HBV vertical transmission, immune dysregulation in sepsis and alcoholic hepatitis, and the host immune response in COVID-19.
Currently, Dr. Islam is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University in the Pathology and Advanced Translational Research Unit (PATRU), under the mentorship of Dr. Ashish Sharma. His work focuses on developing next-generation HIV cure strategies by engineering CCR5-modified, stem-like CD4+ T cells with enhanced antiviral properties. He leverages immunoengineering, gene editing, and non-human primate models, while applying high-dimensional immune profiling, single-cell transcriptomics, and metabolomics to investigate HIV reservoir persistence.He is an active contributor to several NIH-funded projects (UM1AI164561, P01HD112217, R01AI173946) and is also interested in the role of host metabolism, mucosal immunity, and the microbiome in chronic viral infections. Dr. Islam’s expertise spans T cell biology, immune epigenetics, systems immunology, and viral pathogenesis. His long-term goal is to lead an independent program focused on immunotherapies for chronic infections.
Hadiya Johnson
Lead Research Specialist
Pathology Advanced Translational Research Unit
Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
Hadiya Johnson obtained her Bachelors Degree in Psychology at Emory University in 2020. During her time at Emory, she studied both psychological disorders and the biological sciences. Once she graduated, she served as a Lab Tech at the Morehouse School of Medicine in the Neurobiology Department. During her time there, she investigated the relationship between sleep and post-traumatic stress disorder in mice models, utilizing behavioral, EEG and tissue samples to test the hypothesis. Hadiya joined the PATRU lab in 2023, where she serves as the lead research technician under the supervision of Dr. Ashish Sharma. Currently, she is being trained in using Visium and Xenium to analyze tissue samples collected from patients with Tuberculosis, while also assisting in the lab with projects pertaining to HIV.
Ganesh Nalam, MS
Bioinformatics Analyst
Pathology Advanced Translational Research Unit
Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
Ganesh Nalam, MS, is a Bioinformatics Analyst supporting translational research through the analysis of high-throughput sequencing and omics data. He is currently affiliated with a multidisciplinary biomedical research team, where he develops and implements scalable, reproducible analysis pipelines tailored to a wide range of biological datasets.
He holds a Master of Science in Computer Information Systems from Georgia State University, where he focused on data science and computational biology. His training bridges informatics and life sciences, enabling him to apply advanced computational approaches to complex biological questions.
Ganesh specializes in sequencing data alignment and downstream analysis for scRNA-seq, and bulk RNA-seq. He regularly performs alignment of raw FASTQ files, processes data using R and Python, and modifies existing scripts to accommodate study-specific requirements. He leverages cloud computing platforms, including Amazon Web Services and 10x Genomics Cloud, to ensure scalable and efficient data processing.
His work involves close collaboration with immunologists to interpret results and apply supervised analytical methods that address biologically relevant hypotheses. He contributes to team efforts by tailoring analyses to uncover mechanistic insights and supports findings through clear and actionable visualizations, including UMAPs, volcano plots, and pathway enrichment outputs.
Ganesh’s broader interests include multi-omics integration, immune profiling, dynamic modeling of disease progression, and the application of machine learning methods such as dynamic Bayesian networks to biomedical data. His work plays a critical role in translating complex datasets into meaningful biological and clinical insights.