BME Virtual Weekly Seminar Series: Elham Azizi
Description
Elham Azizi, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, will give a talk titled "Machine Learning for Modeling Dynamics in the Tumor Microenvironment" for the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
The faculty host is Jean Fan.
Abstract:
Cancer therapies succeed only in a subset of patients partly due to the heterogeneity of cells across and within tumors. Recent genomic and imaging technologies that measure features at the resolution of single cells and in the context of the tissue, present exciting opportunities to characterize unknown cell types in the complex tumor microenvironment, and elucidate their circuitry and role in driving response to therapies. However, analyzing and integrating single-cell data across patients, time-points, and data modalities involves significant statistical and computational challenges. I will present a set of machine learning methods developed to address problems such as handling sparsity and noise, distinguishing technical variation from biological heterogeneity, inferring underlying circuitry, and tackling limitations of clinical experimental design. I will also present novel biological insights obtained from applying these methods to multiple cancer systems. These results include continuous phenotypic expansion of immune cells when interfacing with breast tumors, and detecting key T cell subsets with divergent temporal dynamics that define response to immunotherapy in leukemia.
Who can attend?
- Faculty
- Staff
- Students
