Congratulations to Nikith, who received a Trudi Berwin Student Support Fellowship from the USC Bridge Institute to complete a BUGS summer research project in the lab. Nikith’s work on novel regulators of the Wnt signaling pathway paves the way for future research in the lab. Well done, Nikith!
Welcome to Ivy and Jesse who join the lab as postdoctoral researchers.
Ivy recently completed her PhD at the University of Oxford, studying the interplay between inherited and somatic genetic variants in cancer.
Jesse recently completed his PhD at the University of California, Irvine, modeling viral dynamics using various approaches including hybrid stochastic-deterministic methods.
Our editorial The diverse landscape of modeling in single-cell biology is out now in Physical Biology. This accompanies a special issue guest edited by Adam and Qing Nie, full of exciting recent advances in theoretical and biophysical modeling for single-cell biology.
This week at SMB 2021, Adam presented recent work led by Xiaojun on single-cell similarity-based parameter inference tools.
We (Adam and co-host Russell Rockne) also organized a mini-symposium on Dynamics and networks in single-cell biology. Thanks to all of the speakers in this two-part session for making it such a success!
Congratulations to all of the QBIO graduates of 2021. A uniquely challenging year, and you did it! Gina Yang and Jaclyn Ready both completed impressive undergraduate research projects this year in our lab. To you and to your classmates, congratulations!!
Our paper, led by Raktim, is out now in Bioinformatics.
Adam has written a perspective on the story behind our recent preprint and the connections to cancer. Thanks to the mathematical oncology blog for the invitation!
Megan Franke developed a multiscale hybrid model of cell-cell communication (with a deterministic cell-internal gene regulatory network and stochastic single-cell resolved signaling model). Through analysis of a large range of cell signaling topologies, we discovered that even subtle cell-cell communication can dramatically alter cell fate decision-making and result in heterogeneous distributions of hematopoietic cell types.
Our analysis also helps to resolve some controversies in the literature regarding myeloid cell fates controlled by the GATA1-PU.1 mutual inhibition loop. The preprint is available here.
In the tenth annual Southern California Systems Biology Symposium, Megan gave an invited talk entitled: Forcing cells to change lineages via cell-cell communication. Congrats, Megan!
The proposal, CAREER: Inference of gene regulatory networks and cell dynamics that control stem cell fate has been awarded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) Mathematical Biology program.
The research objectives of this award focus on developing new network inference methods and multiscale models of the dynamics of stem cells as they make cell fate decisions during differentiation.
The educational objectives of this award focus on training a new generation of scientists to be simultaneously literate in the mathematical and the life sciences. We will develop new curricula for elementary age and middle/high school age students in the local area around USC. We will take on the challenge of translating sophisticated topics (e.g. how & why we make mathematical models of cells) to young audiences. Updates on our progress will be posted in Outreach.