Erin did directed study in the lab focused on characterizing CENP-A in a range of pancreatic pathologies, as part of her MS degree in Computational and Systems Biology (COBB MS program)..
She will soon be joining WuXi Biologics as a Research Scientist.

We wish her the very best!

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Chris, Danielle and Rajdeep will be presenting their work at ISMB 2026.

Chris Andersen will be presenting our new method (sPotts) on de novo cellular phenotyping of tissue microenvironments.

Danielle Pitlor will be presenting new research on understanding remission and relapse in inflammatory bowel disease.

Rajdeep Pawar will be presenting SpaReg, a new algorithm for reconstructing 3D microenvironments using H&E, immunofluorescence or spatial transcriptomic serial sections.

Ksenia Mats has been accepted to the the NIH IRTA post baccalaureate program and will be going to the National Cancer Institute for her post-bac training.

Congrats Ksenia!

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Preprint

Mitochondrial transcript abundance is a standard quality control metric in single-cell RNA sequencing, but fixed percentage thresholds fail to account for the substantial variation in mitochondrial content across cell types and tissues, risking both retention of compromised cells and exclusion of transcriptionally active viable cell populations. We present MitoChontrol, a cell-type-aware probabilistic framework for mitochondrial quality control that models the mitochondrial transcript fraction within transcriptionally coherent clusters as a Gaussian mixture distribution. Compromised-cell components are identified from the upper tail of each cluster-specific distribution, and filtering thresholds are defined as the point at which the posterior probability of cellular compromise exceeds a user-definded confidence value. Applied to controlled perturbation experiments and a pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma single-cell dataset, MitoChontrol selectively removes transcriptionally compromised cells while preserving biologically elevated but viable populations, outperforming fixed-threshold and outlier-based approaches.

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Thomas will be presenting our work at the 2026 Annual meeting of American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) on graph theoretic spatial heterogeneity analysis of multiplexed immunofluorescence images that allows quantitative differentiation of high grade serous carcionma (HGSC) precursor lesions in the fallopian tube.

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We have received R21 grant award from NCI to study, model and predict advanced adenoma recurrence!

Congratulations Rajdeep for winning the best poster award at the 2026 BioE day!

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BioE day is an Annual research day organized by graduate students in the Department of Bioengineering at Pitt, and draws students and faculty from U Pitt, CMU, WVU and Duquesne Universities.

Caitlin will be giving a talk and a poster at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Translational Research Cancer Centers Consortium (TRCCC) on her work on MitoChontrol, an adaptive mtRNA filtering of single cell RNA sequencing data.