"The United States of Single Cells"

Technological developments have enabled high-throughput profiling of single-cell gene expression, epigenetic regulation, and spatial position within complex tissues, providing an opportunity to define the features that delineate cell types and states.

However, this task requires sophisticated computational methods for integrating diverse single-cell datasets from multiple experiments and biological contexts. This talk will cover how metagene factors inferred by integrative nonnegative matrix factorization provide quantitative definition of cellular identity and its variation across biological contexts, allowing robust and scalable integration of highly heterogeneous single-cell datasets.

Joshua Welch, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan.

He received dual undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Piano Performance from Ohio University. After completing his PhD in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017, he performed postdoctoral research with Evan Macosko at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Dr. Welch's research focuses on developing computational approaches for single-cell genomics and applying these approaches to understand cellular differentiation and reprogramming, cancer and the brain. His work has been funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the National Institutes of Health.