Research Focus:

At the Allen Institute for Brain Science, I am part of the Human Cell Types program, which seeks to understand the unique structural and functional characteristics of the human cerebral cortex. In order to achieve this goal, we are striving to classify and describe the diversity of neuronal and glia cell types that exist in the developing and adult human brain. We plan to build upon previous human gene expression atlases created at the Allen Institute, and extend this work to comprehensively describing the molecular characteristics of cells in the human cerebral cortex at the level of single cell gene expression.

We will use high throughput qRT-PCR and RNA-Seq methodologies to conduct transcriptional profiling of a large number of single cells derived from specific stages and regions of the human cerebral cortex. This data will allow us to comprehensively understand the molecular signatures that discriminate individual cell types during brain development and in the adult. The molecular classification data that we generate will be combined with morphological, anatomical, and physiological data generated by other members of the Human Cell Types team to enable a quantitative classification of the breadth of cell types that exist within the human brain.