The Herbert and Florence Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics will continue its seminar series on the topic of mathematical sciences underpinning cancer research. The monthly seminars take place on the second Wednesday of the month, 2:00-3:00 PM EST. The presentations are open to the Columbia community (in person and online) and to researchers outside Columbia (via Zoom).
On Wednesday, November 12th (2:00 PM ET), IICD welcomes Dr. Ken Chen from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Seminar hosted by Dr. Khanh Dinh. The seminar will take place in person in Schermerhorn Hall 603 (Morningside Heights campus). If you wish to attend the seminar remotely, please register using the following link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/MJQS81yBS-KWSoJ-fb2E1g
Title: Cellular Modeling for Studying Cancer Dynamics in Tumor Immune Microenvironment
Abstract: The management of cancer hinges on discovering and interrupting critical events during its course of development, a challenging task due to cancer’s high heterogeneous and dynamic nature. Current technologies enable observing cancer specimens at single-cell resolution with cellular spatial context, providing an unprecedented opportunity to characterize molecular heterogeneity and identify predictive signatures. In this talk, I will summarize our efforts in developing statistical machine-learning approaches for multimodal data representation, fusion, transformation, dynamical systems modeling, and functional interpretation, and applying tools for discovering cellular-molecular features and assets associated with tumor and immune microenvironment coevolution from single-cell and spatial omics data collected from immunotherapy and adoptive cell therapy experiments.
Bio: Dr. Chen obtained B. Eng. from Tsinghua University (Beijing) and Ph.D. in statistical machine-learning from ECE at UIUC. He also worked as a postdoc in Biochemistry at UCSD and a research faculty in Genetics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently a full Professor in the department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the UTMDACC. As elected Fellows of American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), his primary interest is to develop computational methods to analyze and interpret high-throughput human genetic, functional and clinical data towards understanding the evolution of cancer as a consequence of genetics and environment and identifying molecular targets useful for cancer diagnosis and therapeutics. With over 200 journal publications, he has developed and delivered data intelligence for the 1,000 Genomes, The Cancer Genome Atlas, Cancer Target Discovery and Development, Human Cell Atlas, Human Tumor Atlas Network, etc. His recent work involved applying AI/machine-learning in characterizing and modeling human cellular immunity in the context of cancer immunotherapy and adoptive cell therapy. Among the computational systems he developed, BreakDancer, VarScan and Monopogen/Monovar have been widely used for characterizing genomes and transcriptomes of tumor tissues and single cells.
If you would like to meet one-on-one (possibly via Zoom) or attend the lunch or dinner with the speaker, please contact the event organizer.
