december | happy new year!

We celebrated a successful year and the holiday season with a joint holiday party between our lab, Luisa’s and Byron’s.

The three labs got together at a Bowling alley in Decatur for a fun evening of food, drinks, and bowling. Luisa gave birth to her beautiful daughter only two days after the party :)

Happy 2020!

december | graduation, fellowship, and celebrations

Our three Bioinformatics students from Georgia Tech graduated this Friday, December 13th, and received their masters degree — YunZhe Huang, Junkai Yang, and Sachin Kothandaraman. Since they could not attend our regular Friday’s lab meeting, we got them a cake to celebrate!

Also, Devon Eddins, our PhD student in the IMP Program, just submitted his research proposal for an NIH F31 Predoctoral Fellowship! He put together a fantastic proposal and we look forward to seeing the results of his studies.

Congratulations to all! We are very proud of you!

november | talking about single-cell technologies

We just had a fantastic all-day symposium hosted by Yerkes NHP Genomics Core and sponsored by 10x Genomics here at HSRB auditorium. Eliver joined other local faculty working on multi-omics single-cell sequencing to discuss the power and limitations of these technologies and present some of the projects we have been working on.

november | on diversity and inclusion

As part of the Ghosn’s lab mission and commitment to diversity and inclusion, Eliver Ghosn will be attending the ABRCMS conference in Anaheim (CA) to help review research posters from undergraduate students and recruit new talent to our IMP graduate program.

Read the article written by Eliver for the IMP Community Forum.

november | talking about limitations on single-cell multi-omics technologies

Eliver Ghosn is attending the International Transplantation Science meeting in Clearwater Beach (Florida) and will be giving a pre-workshop seminar entitled: Leveraging single-cell multi-omics in transplantation research

november | we are now members of the gut cell atlas community

We got awarded a grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust to develop a new data analysis pipeline to identify and characterize new cell types in the gut of Crohn’s Disease patients (and healthy controls) using single-cell multi-omics technologies. This project is led by Peng Qiu at GT, and include co-PIs Subra Kugathasan (Emory Pediatrics), Greg Gibson (GT), and the Ghosn Lab. This award is part of the Gut Cell Atlas Initiative.

september | new DARPA grant to prevent and treat pandemic Flu

We are very excited to join our collaborators in this major DARPA PREPARE consortium led by Georgia Tech (Phil Santangelo), in collaboration with Emory University, CDC, University of Georgia, Duke University, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Rockefeller University, and Acorda Therapeutics.

This is a 21.9 Million effort to generate new RNA-modulators (CRISPR technology) to prevent and treat against pandemic Flu (Influenza). The project is titled ThIRM: Thwarting Influenza with RNA-powered Modulators.The Ghosn Lab will be responsible for generating single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets from infected and treated tissues.

september | new rotation graduate student

Jim Rose is joining our team as rotating graduate student from the Genetics and Molecular Biology (GMB) Graduate Program. Jim is taking on the task of analyzing and interpreting the single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets from the PBMC of patients with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis.

august | Sachin and junkai were awarded with a fellowship from Georgia Tech

Sachin and Junkai, our computational immunology students have been awarded with the Computational Biology Faculty Research Award!! They are now appointed as Graduate Research Assistants in the Ghosn Lab for this semester.

Congratulations, Junkai and Sachin!

august | undergraduate student joins our team

Diane Mwonga is a current third year undergraduate student majoring in Biology and minoring in Spanish on the pre-medicine track. Throughout her time at Emory, Diane has been involved in Emory Reads and the Zuri African Dance Team. She currently is an undergraduate learning assistant for Dr. Abreu’s introductory biology class. In her free time, she enjoys running through the local neighborhoods, and exploring new restaurants with friends. Diane will work with Lori to generate our new humanized mice.

Welcome to the team, Diane!

august | master’s student joins our computational immunology team

Sachin Kothandaraman is a second-year graduate student in the M.S. Bioinformatics program at Georgia Tech. Sachin is interest in both genomic data analysis and personalized medicine. He will join YunZhe and Junkai to work on our new pipeline to analyze multi-omics single-cell sequencing data, focusing on the B-cell receptor repertoire.

Welcome to the team, Sachin!

august | first-ever immunology Retreat

We just came back from a fantastic two-days of science and drinks with our friends and colleagues from the Emory immunology community at Unicoi State Park for the 2019 IMP Retreat.

This is our first official photo of the Ghosn Lab team (the Bioinformatics students retreated earlier).

Thank you, Rabin Tirouvanziam and members of the organizing committee!

august | talking about multi-omics single-cell technologies

Eliver chaired the Genomics session at the IMP Retreat Symposium and discussed the current limitations in analyzing multi-omics single-cell sequencing datasets. He also discussed some of the work we are doing to address these limitations, including the implementation of our recently published SIC pipeline.

august | poster presentation @ IMP retreat

Junkai Yang presented a posted at our first-ever Immunology (IMP) Retreat at Unicoi State Park. Junkai discussed his current project on combining gene expression with surface markers to cluster and classify immune cells in scRNA-seq datasets.

August | paradigm-shifting

Our new Review article just got published in Development!

We propose that certain tissue-resident immune cells develop independently of the Blood Stem Cell (aka HSC). These findings have implications for Bone Marrow/HSC transplantations performed in clinical settings and also for the understanding of many diseases in which tissue-resident (not circulating) immune cells play a key role.

july | first doctoral fellow to join our team

We are thrilled to have Devon Eddins join our team as the first PhD graduate student from the IMP (Immunology and Molecular Pathogenesis) program. His past research spans from fisheries genetics and genomics to onco-immunology. His graduate research to date focused on understanding innate immune (macrophage and dendritic cell) regulation of emerging, neurotropic flaviviral infections in the periphery and CNS. Devon will implement Hi-D flow cytometry and single-cell RNA-sequencing to study HSC-independent hematopoiesis, and how these populations maintain tissue and immune homeostasis throughout life.

Welcome to the team, Devon!

july | growing the family

We are very excited to have Lori N. Eidson join our team as a research scientist. Lori obtained her PhD in Neuroscience with Dr. Anne Z. Murphy at Georgia State University studying the contribution of the innate immune system to the development of opioid tolerance. Lori recently completed her post-doctoral research training at Emory in the lab of Dr. Malú Tansey where she worked to identify inflammatory biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease. Ultimately, Lori is interested in understanding how our innate and adaptive immune systems contribute to development, normal physiological function, aging, and disease states. In her spare time, Lori enjoys reading, cooking, disc golf, swimming, kayaking, and drawing.

Welcome to the team, Lori!

june | master’s student joins our computational immunology team

Junkai Yang is a second-year Bioinformatics student at Georgia Tech pursuing his master’s degree. Junkai will join YunZhe Huang to work on our new pipeline to analyze multi-omics single-cell sequencing data.

Welcome to the team, Junkai!

june | sic of the curse of dimensionality?

We joined forces with our Stanford colleagues to develop SIC, an automated pipeline to analyze single-cell hi-d flow and mass cytometry datasets, and our research article just got published in Communications Biology!

Check it out here: www.nature.com/s42003-019-0467-6

June | our collaborators awarded two pilot grants

Our collaborators Rabin Tirouvanziam, Prahal Sampath, and Grace Gombolay were named the recipients of the 2019 Pediatric Research Alliance pilot grants. Rabin and Prahal will lead the “EMOJI study”: Emory Multi-Omics Juvenile Arthritis Immunology: bringing deep phenotyping to a vexing pediatric problem, funded by the Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR). Grace will lead the study entitled Blood and Cerebrospinal Fluid Biomarkers in the Correlations of Clinical Outcomes in Pediatric NMDARE, funded by the CCTR and the Center for Neurosciences Research.

We are very excited to participate and contribute to these studies by profiling the immune cell types that populate the both synovial and cerebrospinal fluid of pediatric patients using our novel high-dimensional multi-omics single-cell platform.

may, June | new team members

Ritu Shah is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Emory majoring in Quantitative Science with a minor in Global Health. Ritu will work with Astrid Kosters to learn the various mouse models and immunology assays we use to study the fetal-derived tissue-resident immune cells.

YunZhe Huang is a second-year Bioinformatics student at Georgia Tech interested in multi-omics single-cell sequencing technologies.

 Welcome to the team, Ritu and YunZhe!

April, may, june | posters and oral presentations at conferences

Our research on single-cell RNAseq and B-cell biology will be presented in posters and oral presentations by our collaborators in academia and industry at the upcoming conferences: MAQC (Massive Analysis and Quality Control Society), AAI (American Association of Immunologists), Southeast Pediatric Research, and CYTO/ISAC (International Society for Advancement of Cytometry). 

Congratulations to the presenters Meijian Guan “MJ” (MAQC), Debopam Ghosh (AAI), Nicole Treadway (Southeast Pediatric Research), and Ian Taylor (CYTO)!

april | on the origins of B-1 cells

Eliver Ghosn and 10 other independent investigators published a Science eLetter in response to the new research article by Graf et al. (Science, Feb 15, 2019). Science magazine also ran a piece about our eLetter, highlighted as Online Buzz in the Letters section of the journal.

april | highlighted researcher

Eliver was the featured faculty in the Emory’s Daily Pulse website.

march | undergraduate student to join our team

Mackenzie "Landi" White is an undergraduate at Emory University (Class of 2022) seeking a B.S. in Biology. Her past research experience includes interning at the CDC in the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, where she studied chemical toxicity, and conducting a senior research project studying the facial human microbiome.

In the Ghosn Lab, Landi will work with Astrid Kosters to learn the various mouse models and single-cell techniques to study the fetal-derived tissue-resident immune cells.

Welcome to the team, Landi!

january | CTID Symposium on hi-d single-cell technologies

Eliver Ghosn will join Greg Gibson to discuss the current state in hi-d single-cell technologies, particularly the pros and cons of current pipelines for scRNA-seq data analysis. Join us at Georgia Tech campus (Marcus NanoTechnology Building) on January 30 at 9am.

Register here.