DCMB Weekly Seminar: Do Differences Make a Difference? From Humans to Single Cells

Seminar Details
Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Speaker

John Tsang, PhD
Senior Investigator, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

Location

Abstract:
My lab's research involves the development and application of systems biology approaches—combining computation, machine learning, quantitative modeling, and experiments—to study the immune system in health and disease. Recent technological and computational advances allow comprehensive interrogation of multiple modalities (e.g., proteins, mRNAs, immune receptor sequences) in single cell resolution in the human population. Here I will highlight our work in the analysis human and single cell variations along the axes of early immune development, vaccination, and COVID-19. If time permits, I will also discuss the integration of tissue imaging, machine learning, and multiscale dynamical modeling of immune cell interactions to investigate the homeostatic regulation of autoreactive T cells.

Biography: Dr. Tsang is a senior investigator in the NIH Intramural Research Program and leads a laboratory focusing on systems and quantitative immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He also co-directs the Trans-NIH Center for Human Immunology (CHI) and leads its research program in systems human immunology. Dr. Tsang trained in computer engineering and computer science at the University of Waterloo and received his Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University. Dr. Tsang has worked as a software engineer and pursued systems biology research in both academia and industry including Rosetta Inpharmatics, Caprion Proteomics, MIT, and Merck Research Laboratories. Dr. Tsang has won several awards for his research, including NIAID Merit Awards for the development of a data reuse and crowdsourcing platform OMiCC and for leading a system biology study of human immune variability and influenza vaccination, which was selected as a top NIAID Research Advances of 2014. He currently serves as the founding chief editor of systems immunology for Frontiers in Immunology. He has served as a scientific advisor for a number of programs and organizations including ImmPort (the clinical and molecular data repository for NIAID), the Committee on Precision Medicine for the World Allergy Organization, the NIAID Modeling Immunity for Biodefense Program, the Allen Institute, the Immuno-Epidemiology Program at the National Cancer Institute, and the Human Vaccines Project.