I’m very excited to be joining MIT Biological Engineering @MITdeptofBE as an Assistant Professor and the Ragon Institute @ragoninstitute as a member in January 2026! I will be recruiting students and postdocs (see more info below).
Our multi-year project with @BrunetLab@james_y_zou on building "spatial aging clocks" from spatially resolved single-cell transcriptomics across lifespan and using these clocks to examine spatial effects on brain aging is out now in @Nature !
Paper:
Of course more work is needed to determine how much each of these mediators contributes to these proximity effects and whether T cells or NSCs can be targeted to improve brain function.
My lab will build AI/ML tools and computational methods to model the biology of aging & rejuvenation with a particular focus on spatial and single-cell omics and immune cell interactions.
I would like to extend a big thank you to my amazing co-advisers @james_y_zou & @BrunetLab and to my many fantastic mentors, colleagues, and collaborators!
"Aging clocks" are machine learning models trained to predict age and have been shown to track biological aging across a lot (but not all!) relevant conditions.
Could we build clocks that track aging at spatial and single-cell resolution?
ImageNet-trained deep neural networks exhibit illusion-like response to the Scintillating grid | JOV | ARVO Journals jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?a…
A big thank you to Anne Brunet (@BrunetLab) and James Zou (@james_y_zou) for their fantastic mentorship and to all co-authors for their valuable contributions -- this work would not have been possible without them!!!
Excitingly, some interventions like exercise can modulate the cell proximity effects in a rejuvenating directions (for example reducing the T cell pro-aging effect)!
Summarizing these effects, we found that T cells had the most pro-aging proximity effect and neural stem cells (NSCs) had the most pro-rejuvenating proximity effect on average.