For the seminar on the 6th of December Sofya Marchenko invited Dana Pe’er from the Sloan Kettering Institute (New York, USA), to give us a talk on her recent work. If you are interested in joining write an e-Mail to compcancer at charite dot de to receive the zoom link.
Because of the time difference, the literature seminar will take place virtually on zoom at 3 pm (Berlin- time).
Dr. Dana Pe’er is chair and professor in Computational and Systems Biology Program at Sloan Kettering Institute and a researcher in computational systems biology. She was previously a professor at columbia Department of Biological Sciences. Pe’er’s research focuses on understanding the organization, function and evolution of molecular networks, particularly how genetic variations alter the regulatory network and how these genetic variations can cause cancer. Dana Pe’er investigates cellular development – in particular, how healthy cells shape their identities and build and repair organs, how cancer cells abandon those identities and hijack those processes, and how tissue environments influence an individual cell’s fate. Pe’er’s lab combines mathematical approaches with a range of emerging technologies that enable large-scale analyses of single cells. They are developing computational frameworks to characterize cell-state compositions and tissue-level dynamics and seeking to answer a variety of questions related to the causes and consequences of plasticity in development, regeneration, and cancer. For example, Pe’er wants to understand intratumoral heterogeneity which is essential for predicting cancer behavior and identifying molecular vulnerabilities.
Her Talk is titled „Beyond Cells: Gene programs and tissue context”. In which she will among others talk about methods and results from her very recent publication in Nature Biotechnology „Supervised discovery of interpretable gene programs from single-cell data” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-01940-3).