Today Xiaojun had his PhD conferred at the USC Dornsife PhD hooding ceremony. Many congratulations to Xiaojun Wu, PhD!
Congratulations to Riddhee Mehta who has been awarded a USC SURF fellowship to continue her research in the lab over the summer. Riddhee is a QBIO student working towards a Masters degree in Quantitative and Computational Biology while working in the lab on a project that studies the dynamics of EMT, co-mentored by MeiLu. Riddhee’s research has already led to new insights into EMT intermediate state dynamics.
Collaborative paper on which we contributed, led by the labs of Anne Calof and Arthur Lander at UC Irvine is out now in Science Advances (UCI news article here). We discovered a key role for heterogenous Nipbl+/- expression in mouse embryo fate mis-direction, mediated in part by Nanog overexpression. Use of CellRank for single-cell fate mapping helped to reveal the mis-direction of these gastrulation-stage cell fates. This collaboration was supported by an opportunity award grant to first-author Stephenson Chea at UCI and Jesse in the MacLean lab.
As a part of our ongoing effort to translate our research modeling stem cell biology into curricula appropriate from early K-12 education, Adam visited 3rd grade at Weemes Elementary School on Monday to discuss how math and computers help us to learn about stem cells. We also had a lot of fun playing stem cell superhero. (You can try the game out here)
At our annual retreat for the Dept of Quantitative and Computational Biology in Ventura, overlooking the beach, Xiaojun gave a talk on his research entitled “Data-driven model discovery for complex biological systems.”
Adam visited MIT yesterday to give a talk at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on “Modeling stochastic cancer dynamics in complex tumor microenvironments.”
Our paper investigating the origins of sexual dimorphism in the mouse kidney is out now in Developmental Cell. In this collaboration led by the McMahon lab, together with Pachter and Kim labs, we discovered that regulation mediated largely through Androgen receptor (AR) controls the dimorphism of the mouse kidney. This was made possible via bulk RNA-seq temporal data coupled with single-cell multiomics integrated through computational analyses.
Adam visited Kyoto, Japan, this week, to speak at a mathematical biology conference, OKO: from genes to cells to humans.” He presented recent work from the lab on deciphering cell fate decision-making from single-cell multiomic data via GRN inference with popInfer.
