MeiLu and Adam visited Lund University in Sweden for the 2022 ELLIIT Focus Period on Data-driven modelling and learning for cancer immunotherapy. The goals were to ”unite young international scholars, ELLIIT researchers and other top international academics active in domains such as systems biology, cancer treatment, machine learning and dynamical systems,” and indeed the participants were diverse! From clinicians to a Fields medalist. Yet we managed to find common ground across these broad domains.

Congratulations to Nikith, undergraduate researcher in the lab, who has been awarded a Summer 2022 Provost’s Research Fellowship to continue his research in the lab this summer. Nikith is developing new models of Wnt shuttling and chaperone mechanisms that impact neurodegenerative disorders.

Our paper: Single-cell transcriptomic analysis of zebrafish cranial neural crest reveals spatiotemporal regulation of lineage decisions during development, is out now in Cell Reports. In this work, Xiaojun led the computational analyses of temporal gene expression patterns in zebrafish development.

Ivy, Jesse, and Xiaojun were awarded an opportunity award grant together with Stephenson Chea at UC Irvine. It will study cell fate decisions in a model of Cornelia de Lange Syndrome. This proposal grew out of the annual symposium held at the UC Irvine NSF-Simons Center, congratulations all!

The project, Computational methods to predict gene regulatory network dynamics and cell state transitions is funded by the NIGMS at the NIH. We will investigate fundamental processes underlying cell state transitions using theoretical modeling, statistical inference, and machine learning.