Assistant Professor Shikhar Uttam was awarded a Single-Cell Biology Data Insights grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to support his computational biology research. This grant is part of the CZI Cell Science program.
The Data Insights program promotes the development of computational methods and tools that can enable deeper and biologically meaningful insights into cells in health and disease states from single-cell biology datasets.
“There is a desire to develop cutting-edge computational methods that account for biological context and constraints of complex microenvironments,” Uttam said. “This is what we are working towards.”
Uttam’s lab will use this grant to support a project titled “De Novo Inference of Cell Signaling in Multiplexed Imaging Datasets.” This project will develop computational methods to infer cell signaling within the spatial context of tissue microenvironments. Uttam is interested in studying how this intra and inter cellular signaling drives microenvironment fate.
“Our approach will aim to integrate bioimaging principles with physics and machine learning-based methods in ways that have not yet been attempted,” he said.
Uttam envisions this approach will be applied across disciplines to better understand cellular contexts of developing, healthy and disease microenvironments. Future collaborations will involve the departments of immunology, cell biology, pathology and bioengineering.
He would also like to see this research being able to help patients. “We want to be able to identify critical signaling events and interactions linked to disease progression,” Uttam said. “This will potentially allow us to help develop treatments that can prevent and treat cancer.”
He will complete this project with support from Chris Andersen, a third-year student in the Joint Carnegie Mellon-University of Pittsburgh PhD Program in Computational Biology.
Uttam leaves students and early-career researchers with one piece of advice for their next grant proposal. “It is important that you are interested in and enjoy doing whatever you’re proposing,” Uttam said. “In research, you will experience setbacks, and you will need to persevere when the going gets tough. Your interest and joy will be your guiding lights in those challenging times.”