Statistical Challenges in scRNA-seq and Spatial Transcriptomics Data Analysis

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Rafael Irizarry, Ph.D., chair, department of data science, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; professor, department of biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Speaker bio(s)

Dr. Irizarry will start this talk by describing general statistical challenges in high-throughput genomics related to batch effects and systematic errors. Then he will describe some of his lab's recent work related to cell-type classification and clustering with single-cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) including spatial transcriptomics.

Rafael Irizarry received his bachelor’s in mathematics in 1993 from the University of Puerto Rico and went on to receive a Ph.D. in Statistics in 1998 from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis work was on Statistical Models for Music Sound Signals. He joined the faculty of the Department of Biostatistics in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 1998 and was promoted to Professor in 2007. He is now Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health. Since 1999, Rafael Irizarry's work has focused on Genomics and Computational Biology problems. In particular, he has worked on the analysis and signal processing of microarray, next-generation sequencing, and genomic data. He is currently interested in leveraging his knowledge in translational work, e.g. developing diagnostic tools and discovering biomarkers.

Professor Irizarry also develops open-source software implementing his statistical methodology. His software tools are widely used, and he is one of the leaders and founders of the Bioconductor Project, an open source and open development software project for the analysis of genomic data. Bioconductor provides one of the most widely used software tools for the analysis of microarray data.

In 2009, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) named Professor Irizarry the Presidents' Award winner. In 2017 the members of Bioinformatics.org chose Dr. Irizarry the laureate of the Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences. He also received the 2009 Mortimer Spiegelman Award which honors an outstanding public health statistician under age 40. He also won the 2001 American Statistical Association Nether Young Scholar Award for researcher, younger than 35 years of age, who has significant research accomplishments in nonparametric statistics. Dr. Irizarry was also named a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2009. He served as the chair of the Genomics, Computational Biology and Technology Study Section (GCAT) NIH study section from 2013-2015.

FLS lectures will take place in Caspary Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. We recommend virtual participants log out of VPN prior to logging in to Zoom. Please do not share the link or post on social media. This lecture will be recorded for the RU community.

Open to

Tri-Institutional