Selin Jessa
Hi! I'm a postdoc in Anshul Kundaje's and Will Greenleaf's labs at Stanford University. In broad terms, I'm interested in how cells turn genes on and off at the right time and place in development, and where this goes wrong in disease. More precisely, I use integrative computational analyses of multi-modal genomics data together with deep learning to study how transcription factors shape cell identity during development and disease.
I did my PhD with Claudia Kleinman at McGill University, using data-driven approaches to identify the cell-of-origin of pediatric brain tumors. I care about computational biology that emphasizes reproducibility, transparency, and re-use.
Recent
Our paper presenting the Human Development Multiome Atlas (HDMA), a multi-modal, multi-organ atlas of human fetal development, is now out in Nature! Here we mapped chromatin accessibility and gene expression in 800k single cells during development, used a suite of sequence-to-function deep learning models to understand the organization (or syntax) of transcription factor binding sites in regulatory elements across cell types, and evaluated enrichment of disease-associated genetic variation in cell type-specific regulatory elements. Check out the paper for more details!
Our new preprint about off-target edits from therapeutic CRISPR base editors editors used in gene therapies is out! Tong Wang developed a new assay, beCasKAS, to sensitively detect off-target sites, and I show how non-coding edits can be triaged for epigenetic dysregulation in silico using deep learning.
Our preprint on deciphering the landscape of chromatin accessibility and modeling the DNA sequence syntax rules underlying gene regulation during human fetal development is now up on bioRxiv! This is my first postdoc project and a huge joint effort with Betty Liu, Sam Kim & Yan Ting Ng; led by Will Greenleaf and Anshul Kundaje at Stanford and Kyle Farh’s team at Illumina’s AI lab.
After 10 years in Montreal and 7 amazing years in the Kleinman lab, this week I move to California to start a post-doc in the Kundaje & Greenleaf labs at Stanford - excited for a new chapter!
Thrilled to have successfully defended my PhD!!
In November, my supervisor, Dr. Claudia Kleinman, presented at the Canadian Epigenetics, Environment and Health Research Consortium (CEEHRC) seminar series. I gave a 5-min trainee talk on our recent work on cell-of-origin in pediatric gliomas, and our talk is now online here
This month, I was at the workshop on Deep learning for genetics, genomics, and meta-genomics at the Banff International Research Station; my talk on my PhD work is online here