We are pleased to announce that our AITHYRA SAB Member, Dana Pe’er, Chair of the Computational and Systems Biology Program at the Sloan Kettering Institute, Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Alan and Sandra Gerry Endowed Chair, will give a Special Seminar on “The AI Microscope: Developing Biologically Meaningful Latent Spaces” on 19 November 2026 at 3.00 pm at the IMP Lecture Hall. Hosts will be the Scientific Directors of AITHYRA, Michael Bronstein and Georg Winter.
The group of Dana Pe’er combines machine learning algorithms with single-cell and spatial profiling technologies to address fundamental questions in cancer, immunity and development. High-resolution assays have created enormous opportunities to understand the mechanisms of heterogeneity and plasticity that underlie health and disease. In 2005, Dana Pe’er pioneered large-scale analytics in the single-cell field with the insight that cell-to-cell variability can be exploited for regulatory circuit reconstruction. Her group then devised a conceptual framework to model cell phenotypes as geometric manifolds representing possible cell states. They developed a neighbor-graph-based representation of the phenotypic manifold that serves as the field standard, and contributed foundational methods for identifying and visualizing cell types and states. By leveraging asynchrony in cell states, the group demonstrated that it is possible to infer cellular trajectories and thereby provide dynamics from a single sample, establishing a paradigm that models cell-state transitions in development and disease as continuous processes rather than discrete toggles.
More recently, the Pe’er group has been developing tools for the analysis of multiplexed imaging data, enabling to study spatial heterogeneity and patterning. They innovated a rich mathematical representation of the local environment, or ‘niche’ of a cell, which captures intrinsic biological relationships, as well as tools for largescale analysis of spatial datasets and close integration with sequencing modalities, and they leveraged modularity in cell-cell communication to identify and perturb robust, niche-defining signaling circuits between cell populations. The group uses computational approaches to decipher cell fate decisions and the regulatory circuits controlling cell identity and plasticity, and to learn how diverse cell types act in a coordinated fashion in tissues. Many of the approaches are focused on understanding heterogenous immune cell populations and inferring cellular interactions in the dynamic tumor microenvironment.
https://www.mskcc.org/research/ski/labs/dana-pe-er
No registration is needed.
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