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Seminar: Jim Heath, Distinguished NanoES Practitioner

Dr. James Heath,
President, Institute for Systems Biology Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, UCLA; Professor of Bioengineering, UW

Tuesday, January 22, 2019
1:00-2:00pm
NanoES 181

Abstract
In this talk I will discuss new algorithms and analytical methods associated with single cell analysis, with an emphasis on capturing and analyzing multiple levels of information (i.e. multi-omic analysis) from the same single cells. In one application, I will discuss how continuous cellular trajectories can be extracted from a kinetic series of snapshots, each of which provides a view of the cell-state space sampled by a cell population at a given point in time. The approach will be applied towards the study of the short-time development of drug resistance in patient- derived melanoma models against targeted inhibitors. In a second application, I will discuss how integrated metabalomic, lipidomic, and transcriptomic single cell assays can be integrated to begin developing causal relationships across analyte classes. Finally, I will discuss large library approaches designed for sampling and single cell characterization of antigen-specific T cell populations.

About the Speaker
James Heath serves as the President of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle WA. Until early 2018 he was the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. For the past 14 years he has also directed the National Cancer Institute funded NSB Cancer Center.

Dr. Heath received his PhD in chemistry in 1988 from Rice University, where he was the principal student involved in the Nobel Prize–winning discovery of C60 and the fullerenes. He was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley from 1988 to 1991 and served on the technical staff at IBM Watson Labs from 1991 to 1993. In 1994 he joined the faculty at UCLA. He founded the California NanoSystems Institute in 2000 and served as its director until moving to Caltech.

Dr. Heath’s lab works on fundamental problems at the interface of the chemical, physical, biological, and biomedical sciences, with focus areas of molecular biotechnologies and oncology.

He has received numerous awards, including a Public Service Commendation from California Governor Grey Davis, the Director’s Service Award from the NCI, the Sackler Prize, Irving Weinstein Award from the AACR, and he was named by Forbes in 2011 as one of the 7 most powerful innovators in the world. He has founded several companies, including Integrated Diagnostics (sold to Biodesix in 2018), Indi Molecular, PACT Pharma, Sofie Biosciences, and Isoplexis.