Speakers

Dr. Rong Fan is the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Pathology. His research interest has been centered on development and deployment of single-cell and spatial omics technologies for the study of human tissue function in normal physiology, aging, and disease. He developed single-cell 42-plex cytokine assay which remains the highest multiplex for single-cell protein secretion measurement. He conceived and demonstrated the first "spatial multi-omics" sequencing by developing a unique approach named deterministic barcoding in tissue (DBiT) for mapping whole transcriptome and ~300 proteins pixel-by-pixel directly on a fixed tissue section.

His research also led to the debut of a new dimension in spatial omics – "spatial epigenomics" – with the development of spatial-ATAC-seq, spatial-CUT&Tag, and spatial epigenome-transcriptome co-profiling. Recently, he further developed Patho-DBiT for pathology-compatible spatial profiling of all kinds of RNA species including mRNA, splicing isoforms, microRNA, tRNA, snoRNA, snRNA, and even single nucleotide variants and RNA editing in archival FFPE tissue specimens. These technologies have been applied to the study of human and mouse brain development, neuroinflammation, cellular senescence and aging, tumor initiation, progression and metastasis, and human cardiovascular diseases. Spatial multi-omics is poised to fuel the next wave of biomedical research revolution and facilitate clinical biomarker discovery and therapeutic development.