Penn-CHOP Kidney Innovation Center February 2023 Seminar

This seminar series features research in progress by postdocs, fellows, and faculty within the Penn-CHOP community. The conference also includes experts from various core facilities presenting method-based research seminars, bioethics lectures by University of Pennsylvania (Penn) medical ethics and health policy faculty, as well as invited speakers from outside Penn.

This seminar will feature Katalin Susztak, MD, PhD, David Zhang, PhD, and Mingyao Li, PhD.

Dr. Susztak is a professor of Medicine at Penn and the Co-Director of the Kidney Innovation Center. Dr. Susztak has made discoveries fundamental towards defining critical genes, cell types and mechanisms of chronic kidney disease. She was instrumental in defining genetic, epigenetic transcriptional changes in diseased human kidneys. She identified multiple novel kidney disease genes and demonstrated role of Notch signaling and metabolic dysregulation in kidney disease development. Dr. Susztak's discoveries span genetics, genomics, epigenetics, molecular biology, physiology and nephrology, and have enormous translational relevance and considerable therapeutic potential. Learn more about Dr. Susztak's work.

Dr. Li is a Professor of Biostatistics at Penn and her main research area is statistical genetics and genomics. The central theme of her current research is to use statistical and machine learning approaches to understand cellular heterogeneity in human disease relevant tissues, to characterize gene expression diversity across cell types, and to study the patterns of cell state transition and crosstalk of various cells using data generated from single-cell transcriptomics studies. Dr. Li is also interested in collaborating with researchers seeking to identify complex disease susceptibility genes. Her collaborative research includes cardiometabolic diseases, age-related macular degeneration, Alzheimer's disease, chronic kidney disease, type 1 diabetes, and cancer.

Dr. Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher at Penn and he will present his work on super-resolution gene expression imputation from spatial transcriptomics. His methodological research focuses on interpretable and sample-efficient statistical learning methods, with an emphasis on deep learning and Bayesian models. Dr. Zhang is interested in spatial multi-omics, medical imaging, and genomics.

Join

Join in-person at the Hub Center for Clinical Collaboration, 1632 Conference Room,  or virtually via Teams on February 23, 2023 at 4:00pm.

Registration

Register in advance for this meeting.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Questions?

Please contact Sarah Green (greens10@chop.edu) with any questions or to suggest future seminar speakers and/or topics.

For more information, please visit Penn-CHOP KIC.

The Penn-CHOP Kidney Innovation Center is led by Michelle Denburg and Katalin Susztak and brings together scientists in clinical epidemiology, biostatistics, bioinformatics, computational biology, genetics, pathology, physiology, biochemistry, immunology, genomics, pharmacology, psychology and education with the key concept of interdisciplinary collaboration as the driving force to accelerate improvements in the health and well-being of all patients with kidney disease. The Center’s collaboration between Penn and CHOP is focused on ultimately transforming patient care by early detection, prevention and treatment of kidney disease and its complications across the life course.