Statistical Bioinformatics Seminar: Mar -- One of these cells is not like the other - how variability of gene expression highlights regulatory control

The aim of the statistical bioinformatics seminar is to provide a forum for 
people working within the broad area of computation and statistics and their 
application to various aspects of biology to present their work and showcase 
their ongoing projects. It is intended to foster the exchange of ideas and 
build potential collaborations across multiple disciplines.

The format of the talk is approximately 45 minutes plus questions.

Monday November 19, 2018
The seminars are held at 1:00 pm on Mondays at the Charles Perkins Centre, 
Seminar Room (Level 3, large meeting room). 

Speaker: A/Prof Jessica Mar (The University of Queensland)

Title: One of these cells is not like the other - how variability of gene 
expression highlights regulatory control.

Abstract: When studying the transcriptome, our inferences typically revolve 
around changes in average gene expression. For a population of single cells, 
modeling gene expression distributions and how their properties differ 
between phenotypes, can be far more informative than following average 
trends alone. This talk outlines some of the approaches my lab has developed
 to investigate how variability of gene expression contributes to our 
understanding of transcriptional regulation.

About the speaker: Associate Professor Jessica Mar is a Group Leader at 
the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the 
University of Queensland in Brisbane. The Mar group focuses on understanding 
variability in the transcriptome and how this informs regulation of cell 
phenotypes. Jess received her PhD in Biostatistics from Harvard University 
in 2008. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute 
in Boston (2008-11), and an Assistant Professor at Albert Einstein College 
of Medicine in New York (2011-2018). Having only just relocated back to 
Australia as an ARC Future Fellow this year in July, a major focus of her 
work is on modelling the aging process using single cell bioinformatics. 
Jess has received several awards, including a Fulbright scholarship (2003), 
the Metcalf Prize for Stem Cell Research from the National Stem Cell 
Foundation of Australia (2017), and the one that she is the proudest of 
is the LaDonne H. Shulman Award for Teaching Excellence (2017) because 
the winner is selected by the graduate students at Albert Einstein College 
of Medicine.