The Spatial Biology Revolution 2023

Dr. Jasmine Plummer, PhD is the founding Director of the Center for Spatial Omics and member of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at St Jude's Children's Research Hospital. She is an Associate Professor and cross appointed in the Department of Developmental Neurobiology and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology. She received her PhD in Molecular and Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto, Mount Sinai Hospital. Dr. Plummer completed her post doctoral training at Children's hospital Los Angeles and University of Southern California and moved into a faculty role at Cedars Sinai where she became a funded PI of the Human Cell Atlas. Dr. Plummer was also co-director of the Genomics Core at Cedars Sinai which focused on generating genomic data for a variety of technologies from single cell and spatial assays to sequencing. Dr. Plummer's lab uses a multi-omic approach through single cell and spatial genomics to better understand the pathogenesis of neurodevelopmental disorders and cancer. Since moving to her new role, Dr. Plummer has established one of the first center's specializing in the application of spatial technologies to a variety of disease types.

Anna Wilbrey-Clark is a Senior Staff Scientist in Sarah Teichmann’s lab, where she has worked on the Human Cell Atlas project for the past 6 years. Anna is focussed on spatial genomics / transcriptomics technologies; specifically bringing in and scaling up new technologies to support Sarah Teichmann’s research activities. Prior to joining the Human Cell Atlas, Anna completed a PhD at the Babraham Institute and spent 7 years in R&D at Pfizer.

Benton Berigan is a product manager at Canopy Biosciences, a Bruker company, specializing in ChipCytometry and Canopy’s Spatial Services. He received his PhD in Biology and postdoctoral training in Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Missouri, where he conducted basic and translational research using a combination of fluorescence imaging, electrophysiology, gene expression analysis, and bioinformatics to study bladder function in mice and characterize novel temperature-dependent proteins for thermogenetic neurostimulation. Prior to joining Canopy Biosciences, he served as lab director for an ISO 17025 and state-licensed testing laboratory where he validated various analytical methodologies to provide consumer safety information and screen for pathogens, pesticides, and other contaminates in cannabis products intended to be sold at state-licensed dispensaries.

James is a Wellcome Trust funded PhD student who joined the Teichmann group in 2021. He received his medical degree from Oxford University before undertaking a NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship based in Cambridge. He is a cardiologist in training, with a clinical focus in electrophysiology and inherited cardiac conditions. He will use scRNAseq to characterise site-, age- and disease-dependent changes in the cardiac transcriptome.

Michael Smith, Ph.D. is Application Manager for the Cell DIVE Multiplexed Imaging Solution at Leica Microsystems. He completed a Ph.D. in the genetics of DNA repair at Columbia University and a postdoctoral fellowship in genome integrity and cellular aging at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he leveraged microscopy to understand the real-time dynamics of DNA homeostasis. His passion for answering biological questions using imaging technologies led him to his current position, where he provides technical expertise and customer support for the Cell DIVE platform.

Lauren is a scientist in the molecular biology group at 10x Genomics where she supports the spatial platform. She earned her PhD in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her background is in molecular biology, translational oncology and biochemistry.

Dr. Daniel Schäfer is Team Coordinator R&D at Miltenyi Biotec. After studying Biology at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), University of Manchester (UK), and University of Cologne (Germany), he did his PhD in Molecular Medicine at the University Medical Center Göttingen (Germany). At Miltenyi Biotec, Daniel uses his interdisciplinary education and scientific experience to push forward the development of new technologies for CAR T cell therapy, their pre-clinical evaluation and translation into clinical applications.

Dr. Chaligne leads the Single-cell Analytics Innovation Lab (SAIL) team intending to develop and deploy cutting-edge molecular profiling and data analysis solutions to support the broad community at Memorial Sloan Kettering. The SAIL's team's mission is to assimilate emerging technologies in the rapidly advancing fields of single-cell sequencing and imaging-based profiling, in addition to providing robust analytical solutions. SAIL partners with a dedicated computational team that benchmarks new tools and generates pipelines to support an expanding set of technologies and data modalities to provide a full solution, from sample to high quality data to their collaborators at MSKCC

Ninning Liu is a staff scientist in the Molecular Robotics Initiative where his focus is on engineering DNA-based tools for spatial-omics, biosensing, and high-throughput barcoding. His current interests include working at the interface between imaging and sequencing technologies, applied ML, and exploring application areas of translational technologies at the Wyss. Ninning received his Ph.D. at Berkeley in Molecular and Cellular Biology in single-molecule assays of DNA molecular motors. He then did his postdoctoral fellowship at HMS in Peng Yin’s group where he developed a nanoscale labeling strategy with light, Action-PAINT, and was a co-inventor of Light-Seq, a light-directed spatial-omic technology platform.

Supriya Bidanta is currently working as a research assistant within Dr. Katy Borner’s lab at Indiana University. Her major is bioengineering with a minor focus on bioinformatics.

Dr. Kyoung-Jae Won received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electronics from Chung-Ang University, Korea in 1996, and 1998, respectively. He received his PhD in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Southampton, UK in 2006. He worked at the University of Copenhagen in 2006 and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) from 2007 to 2010 as a postdoctoral researcher. During this time, he applied hidden Markov Models to various biological questions including epigenomics gene regulation. He joined at the School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania as a Research Assistant Professor in 2011 and BRIC, University of Copenhagen as an Associate Professor in 2018. He joined Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 2022. He is interested in developing computational algorithms for single cell and spatial genomics data.