Principal Investigators

Junhyong Kim PhD

Dr. Kim is the Patricia M. Williams Professor of Biology and Adjunct Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on single cell genomics, computational biology, and evolutionary biology. He received PhD training as a theoretical biologist in the field of applied math and statistics with applications in population genetics and phylogenetics. He subsequently trained in Drosophila molecular genetics and started his research career in the field of evolution of development. For the past 15 years, his research has focused on functional genomics and genomic algorithms. He and MPI Eberwine has been collaborating in single cell biology research since 2006, developing new experimental methods, data modeling methods, and analysis softwares.

James Eberwine PhD

Dr. Eberwine is the Elmer Holmes Bobst Professor of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania. He pioneered single cell PCR, the aRNA amplification protocol, and coined the phrase “expression profile” to describe the relative abundances of RNAs. Dr. Eberwine’s research combines cutting edge optical technologies with molecular biology to solve genomic and neuroscience problems. Dr. Eberwine’s work has highlighted the kinetics of translation in neuronal dendrites, pioneered the concept of cytoplasmic RNA splicing and illuminated the role of RNA populations in establishing and maintaining cellular phenotype. Dr. Eberwine is an inventor on over 170 patent applications and was elected to the National Academy of Inventors in 2014. He also serves on the NIH Multi-Council Working Group (MCWG), which is charged with advising the NIH Institutes on the implementation and progress of the US Brain Initiative. Dr. Eberwine originated and directed the Cold Spring Harbor Summer Course formerly entitled “Cloning of Neural Genes” and now called “Advanced Techniques in Neuroscience”. In 2012, he developed and Co-Directed the first Cold Spring Harbor Course on “Single Cell Techniques”.

Advisory Panel

Nancy Allbritton MD PhD

Kenan Professor & Chair, UNC/NC State Department of Biomedical Engineering
University North Carolina, Chapel Hill
North Carolina State University

Maja Bucan

Professor of Genetics
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine

Amy Herr PhD

Lester John & Lynne Dewar Lloyd Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering
University of California, Berkeley

Ken Zaret PhD

Joseph Leidy Professor
Director, Institute for Regenerative Medicine
Department of Cell and Developmental Biology
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine

Co-Investigators

Ron Anafi MD PhD

Dr. Anafi is a physician and engineer with broad interests in applying mathematical and engineering techniques to challenges in biological dynamics. His clinical and research efforts have focused on sleep and circadian biology. He has extensive experience in dynamical systems modeling and statistical analysis of high-dimensional data. He has developed unsupervised machine learning approaches to order un-annotated biopsy data and identify clinical relevant biological rhythms in high dimensional data as well as Bayesian learning algorithms to integrate diverse data and identify new core circadian factors.

M. Sean Grady MD

Dr. Grady is the Chairman of the Dept. of Neurosurgery, and one of his goals has been to bring the clinical and basic neurosciences together in order to treat disease and develop a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying neurological pathology. His academic endeavors for over 25 years have involved the study and treatment of traumatic brain injury (TBI). His basic research projects have focused on the alterations and recovery of the brain following experimental traumatic brain injury. He focused on the hippocampus in the early stages of his career, including its cholinergic input and synaptic plasticity, all of which are now ripe for investigation at the sub-genomic level. As part of his interest in traumatic brain injury, he has used his investigations in experimental injury to discover methods to find similar evidence in human TBI. These projects have given him expertise in how to successfully obtain human tissue for research from that which would otherwise be discarded during surgery. Through his current collaboration with Drs. Kim and Eberwine, they have analyzed mRNA and phenotyped cells from both live brain slices and cultured neurons from patients with varied disorders.

David Issadore PhD

Dr. Issadore is Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the integration of microelectronics, microfluidics, nanomaterials and molecular targeting, and their application to medicine. This multidisciplinary approach enables Issadore’s lab to explore new technologies to bring medical diagnostics from expensive, centralized facilities, directly to clinical and resource-limited settings. Relevant applications of these new technologies include early detection of pancreatic cancer, Tuberculosis diagnosis in patients co-infected with HIV, and prognosis of traumatic brain injury. His academic background in electrical engineering and applied physics from Harvard and his research experience in a hospital research laboratory (MGH) have prepared him to work and collaborate effectively on these inherently cross-disciplinary problems.

Daeyeon Lee PhD

Dr. Lee is Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an expert in the area of soft matter science and engineering. In particular, he has special expertise in large-scale encapsulation using parallelized microfluidic devices as well as understanding the phase inversion, wetting and stability of emulsion droplets on/near surfaces. Since 2006, he has been awarded more than 30 research awards/grants/contracts from federal, state and private institutions and has published over 100 journal articles (cited more than 6,000 times) with an h-index of 39. He has received the 2014 Unilever Young Investigator Award in Colloid and Surfactant Science, 2012 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award, and the 2011 NSF CAREER Award among other honors.

Jai-Yoon Sul PhD

Dr. Sul is Research Assistant Professor of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics. He trained as a astrocyte physiologist with a focus on calcium homeostasis. He has extensive expertise in biophotonics and single cell methods. He developed photo-transfection methods and was a co-inventor of the TIVA-tag method for laser-activated RNA isolation from slice culture. He is an expert in microscopy and optical method for cell physiology measurements.

Jonathan Sweedler PhD

Dr. Sweedler is the James R. Eiszner Family Chair of Chemistry and Director of School of Chemical Sciences Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on developing new approaches for assaying small volume samples, and in applying these methods to study novel interactions between cells. These analytical approaches include capillary separations and mass spectrometry, the two areas highlighted in his center research. He uses these tools to characterize small molecules and peptides in a range of animal models across the metazoan and in samples as small as individual cells and cellular domains. He published the first mass spectrometric characterization of the peptides in a single dense core vesicle. Recent work includes the development of a series of high throughput mass spectrometry approaches for characterizing tens of thousands of individual cells. In terms of neuroscience, Sweedler and his collaborators have created and validated neuropeptide characterization approaches reporting more than 1000 novel peptides and 200 neuropeptide prohormones.

John Wolf PhD

Dr. Wolf is a systems neuroscientist with a focus on the electrophysiology of traumatic brain injury. He previously developed methodology for both large animal and human neurophysiology with ex vivo tissue, allowing for both circuit level analysis (large animal) and phenotypic and transcriptomic analysis of single cells (human tissue). His first research endeavor was studying traumatic axonal injury in vivo and in vitro, during which he developed the in vitro methods for characterizing mechanisms of calcium influx post injury. His work in computational and network modeling of the ventral striatum includes the most detailed model of the medium spiny neuron and he developed multi-electrode awake recordings in this region of the rat brain. His laboratory is focused on understanding potential circuitry mechanisms of cognitive and emotional dysfunction following traumatic brain injury using in vivo neurophysiology in the awake behaving animal (rat and pig), as well as with human tissue from neurosurgery.

James Zou PhD

Dr. Zou is an assistant professor of Biomedical Data Science and, by courtesy, of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He is also an inaugural Chan-Zuckerberg Investigator. His research spans the spectrum of developing rigorous foundations of machine learning, on the one hand, to developing efficient, scalable algorithms and applying these methods to address key questions in genomics. He has collaborated widely with colleagues in machine learning, statistics, genomics as well as with clinicians. His research has been published in the leading machine learning venues (NIPS, ICML, AISTATS, AAAI) and the top scientific journals (Nature, Cell, Nature Methods, PNAS), and has won several paper awards. He is also the developer of EWASher, a widely used software for conducting epigenome-wide association studies.

Project Manager

Stephen Fisher PhD

Dr. Fisher is a Research Manager in Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has expertise in high-performance computer systems, genomic data analysis, software design, data provenance, and administration. He was the project manager for both the Penn's NIH Common Fund Single Cell Analysis Program-Transcriptome (SCAP-T) center and the Data Coordinating Group responsible for processing all data from the Penn, UCSD, and USC SCAP-T U01 centers. As project manager for the Data Coordinating Group, he coordinated data deposition, data sharing, and monthly informatics meetings for the three groups. He also designed and built the RNAseq pipeline used to process all of the data from the three SCAP-T U01 centers.

Other Key Personnel

Stanislav Rubakhin PhD

Senior Research Scientist
University of Illinois

Jifen Li PhD

Education and Outreach
University of Pennsylvania

Erik Nordgren PhD

Research Specialist
University of Pennsylvania

Expert Consultants Panel

Nancy Allbritton MD PhD

Kenan Professor & Chair, UNC/NC State Department of Biomedical Engineering
University North Carolina, Chapel Hill
North Carolina State University

Ed Boyden PhD

Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute
Departments of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Leader, Synthetic Neurobiology Group
Co-Director, MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Richard Caprioli PhD

Stanford Moore Chair in Biochemistry
Professor of Medicine, Chemistry & Pharmacology
Vanderbilt University

Daniel Chiu PhD

A. Bruce Montgomery Professor of Chemistry
Endowed Professor of Analytical Chemistry
Professor of Bioengineering
Department of Chemistry and Bioengineering
University of Washington

Amy Herr PhD

Lester John & Lynne Dewar Lloyd Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering
University of California, Berkeley

Peter Kharchenko PhD

Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Harvard Stem Cell Institute
Harvard Medical School

Yun Song

Professor of Computer Science and Statistics
University of California, Berkeley

Ken Zaret PhD

Joseph Leidy Professor
Director, Institute for Regenerative Medicine
Department of Cell and Developmental Biology
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine