Our approach
We are committed to advancing single-cell science by making it accessible and empowering fellow scientists to dive into their data one cell at a time.
It is essential to closely pair biological understanding with computational expertise, especially with the ever-increasing scale of data generation. By harnessing single-cell science both as a scientific resource and an organizing principle, we aim to establish an open pediatric research community that accelerates solutions within an interdisciplinary framework.
The Network’s activities are focused on teaching, enabling, and sharing critical analytical knowledge and skills in single-cell science with the Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) community and beyond. Additionally, it will ensure the utmost respect for pediatric participants and their families, as researchers and clinicians will be empowered to comprehensively examine each individual sample.
Here are some of our guiding questions defining how we think about science and going about scientific discovery.
Teamwork
Respect
Open Research
Diversity
Integrity
Innovation
Chris Walsh
Chris Walsh studies development of the human cerebral cortex, part of our brain responsible for cognitive capabilities that define us as human. Genetic abnormalities can disrupt that development, causing intellectual disabilities, epilepsy, and autism, while somatic mutations arising during that development contribute to brain disorders from childhood to old age.
Jose Ordovas Montanes
Jose is motivated to understand how pediatric tissues such as the nose and gut “remember” inflammation and infection. His group is developing experimental and computational methods to chart disease trajectories and predict responsiveness to therapies.
Marc Elosua Bayes
Marc is the lead computational biologist of the Cell Discovery Network. He aims to use the power of single-cell and spatially resolved technologies to provide precision medicine treatments. Using high-resolution technologies to interrogate biology, he wants to better understand disease-driving mechanisms, where a patient sits within the disease landscape, and how to effectively treat it. When not in the lab, he loves to be outdoors – trail running is his happy place – playing board games and watching wildlife documentaries.
Before moving to Boston, he majored in Biology and did an MSc in Bioinformatics for the Health Sciences at the UPF in Barcelona. During that time he was also working as a research assistant in the Ramos lab to understand the association between arterial stiffness and cardiovascular diseases. He then carried out his Ph.D. co-supervised by Dr. Ivo Gut and Dr. Holger Heyn at the CNAG-CRG, Barcelona. His Ph.D. work centered around developing computational tools to integrate single-cell and spatial transcriptomics technologies to better understand the tumor microenvironment.
Kyle Kimler
As the senior open data scientist at the CDN, Kyle Kimler excels in uniting computational biology, data science, and cloud computing. He has a passion for open science, and is most excited for community-centric endeavors aimed at disseminating and advancing single-cell analysis methods. At the CDN, Kyle aims to develop and apply computational tools to analyze large-scale multiomics datasets to improve patient diagnosis, stratification and treatment. Kyle got a Bachelors at Notre Dame and a Master’s at the Karolinska Institute, and fell in love with Sweden while living there. Kyle also loves the outdoors, and can be frequently seen running long distances and exploring. He also loves to read, make music, and travel, and aspires to one day participate in adventure races across the globe.
Rose Hedderman
Rose studied computational biology and neuroscience in undergrad with a couple of years of experience in machine learning. At the CDN, she aims to bring an industry perspective to building data science tools for single-cell. She is passionate about combining her interests such as using ML for single-cell analysis while learning new data processing and pipeline techniques specific to large scale single-cell research. Rose graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 2022 and recently moved to Boston. She enjoys spending time outside hiking or jogging, visiting friends around the country, and attending concerts.
Matthew Morabito
Matt’s experience in science comes by the way of athletic development as a collegiate and private triathlon coach. His experiments are with his athletes (and with himself, though he has a coach), and his data analysis translates to watts, heart rate, and regression rates. For us, his title in the Cell Discovery Network is program coordinator, and rather than being involved with the science he negotiates the teams logistics. When not working for CDN, or coaching, his third job is being a professional triathlete and you can likely find him out training or at a race. Matt is never far away from science as he is engaged to an immunology post doc.
Vijay Sankaran
Vijay Sankaran wants to understand how blood and immune cells are produced in health and disease. His group leverages naturally-occurring genetic variation to decipher this process and develops new single-cell genomic technologies, as well as computational tools, to provide a new lens on understanding this process.
Leslie Kean
Leslie S. Kean’s research focuses on immunology in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, tolerance induction in solid organ transplantation through cellular therapeutics, and immune tolerance in autoimmune diseases. Her work aims to uncover mechanisms of immune tolerance, particularly in graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), mixed-chimerism for solid organ transplants, transplant rejection, GI autoimmune diseases, and immune reconstitution after transplantation. Dr. Kean’s research has led to novel non-human primate models, groundbreaking clinical trials, and FDA approval of abatacept for GVHD prevention, marking the first approval for this purpose. She employs cutting-edge single-cell transcriptomic and computational methods to study complex immunological diseases at the molecular level.
Jeff Moffitt
Jeff Moffitt and his laboratory share a passion for the construction of new types of genome-scale microscopy methods and their use in charting the molecular and cellular organization of the gut in health and disease.
Maria Gutierrez-Arcelus
Maria Gutierrez-Arcelus investigates the molecular mechanisms of immune-mediated diseases. She runs an interdisciplinary lab that utilizes genetics and multi-omics quantitative approaches to deepen our understanding of human gene regulation, how it affects cell states, and how these aspects contribute to diseases such as lupus, asthma, ankylosing spondylitis, and tuberculosis.
Sangita Choudhury
Sangita Choudhury and her Lab investigate the role of somatic mutations and the underlying molecular mechanisms of regeneration, aging and disease progression, and of the heart. Choudhury Lab research is at the intersection of cardiology, genomics, and translational medicine.