Oz Single Cell 2027

Caleb Lareau

Dr. Caleb Lareau is an Assistant Member in the Computational and Systems Biology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He leads a technology-development focused group that spans new computational methods for petabyte-scale data analysis to new single-cell methodologies. His group is particularly interested in elucidating the determinants of effective immunity against tumors and infections. X/twitter: CalebLareau Linkedin: CalebLareau

Erwin Schoof

Prof Erwin Schoof, DTU Erwin Schoof is a Professor in the Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Technical University of Denmark, where he leads the Cell Diversity Lab within the Section for Medical Biotechnology. His group works on the fundamental principles governing cellular heterogeneity in complex biological systems, with a focus on the blood system and cancer. He specialises in single-cell spatial proteomics and has authored dozens of papers in the field.

Heather Marlow

A/Prof Heather Marlow, University of Chicago Heather Marlow is an Assistant Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago. Her research centres on genomics, evolution and regulatory networks, with recent work on adaptive cellular radiations and the genetic mechanisms underlying diversification of animal nervous systems. She completed her PhD in Zoology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and trained at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg.

• Heather Marlow's website

Jong-Eun Park

A/Prof Jong-Eun Park, KAIST Jong-Eun Park is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering, KAIST, and a Chief Investigator at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), South Korea. His research combines single-cell and spatial multiomics with computational approaches to understand cellular diversity and interactions in cancer, immunity, and ageing. His group develops integrated human cell atlases and analytical methods to investigate how cell states and tissue environments change in disease. His work also explores the development and evolution of the immune system, connecting comparative biology with human disease research.

Nancy Zhang

Nancy R. Zhang is the Ge Li and Ning Zhao Professor of Statistics and Data Science, University of Pennsylvania. Her research develops statistical and machine learning methods for high-dimensional omics data, with applications to understanding cancer biology and human disease. A major focus of her work is single-cell and spatial genomics, where her group has created statistical frameworks, such as SAVER, MUSIC, Canopy, Codex, Alleloscope, Maxfuse, and CellANOVA, that enable rigorous interpretation of complex molecular data. Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University in 2005, joined the Stanford faculty in 2006, and moved to Penn in 2012. Her honors include the Sloan Research Fellowship, the IMS Medallion Lectureship, the Frontiers of Science Award, and the inaugural David Cox Medal for Statistics.

Sidi Chen

Prof Sidi Chen, Yale University Sidi Chen joined the Yale faculty in 2015 across the Department of Genetics, the Systems Biology Institute and Yale Cancer Center. He develops genome editing and high-throughput screening technologies, including precision CRISPR-based in vivo models of cancer, to map the functional drivers of oncogenesis and metastasis at global scale. His group translates these platforms into new modalities of cancer immunotherapy, cell therapy and gene therapy, work recognised by the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, the Pershing Square Sohn Prize and the Blavatnik Innovator Award.

Alicia Oshlack

Professor Alicia Oshlack has been at the forefront of bioinformatics research for more than 20 years and is the Head of the Computational Biology Program and group leader at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. Oshlack is best known for her large body of work on transcriptional analysis, medical genomics and methylation analysis. In addition, Oshlack is internationally recognised for her development of bioinformatics methods for a range of applications including single cell RNA-seq, methylation and genomic analysis. Oshlack is involved in many cutting-edge collaborative projects utilising high throughput sequencing to investigate disease and development. She has published more than 150 papers and has developed more than a dozen software packages. Oshlack has been broadly recognised as a leader in computational biology by several awards including the Australian Academy of Science, Gani Medal for Human Genetics (2011), the Georgina Sweet Award for Women in Quantitative Biomedical Research (2016), Senior Fellow of the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (2023) and elected as a member of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science (2021).

• Alicia Oshlack's website

Amanda Oliver

Dr Amanda Oliver, QIMR Berghofer Amanda Oliver leads the Barrier Immunity Lab at QIMR Berghofer, which she joined in 2025 after a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship in Sarah Teichmann's lab at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Her work on human mucosal tissues uncovered a previously unrecognised IgA niche in healthy airways and identified a pro-inflammatory role for metaplastic epithelial cells in the inflamed intestine, published in Nature and Nature Genetics. Her team now combines high-resolution transcriptomics with patient-derived in vitro systems to define how epithelial-immune interactions break down in inflammatory bowel disease, COPD and bronchiectasis.

Christian Pflüger

Dr Christian Pflueger, Harry Perkins Institute Christian Pflueger is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Epigenetics and Genomics team at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, with a joint role at the University of Western Australia. He leads a targeted epigenome-engineering programme that builds molecular tools to repair dysfunctional cells and to enhance immune cells for cancer therapy. His expertise spans epigenomic profiling, gene editing and bioinformatic analysis, working at the intersection of functional genomics and CRISPR platforms.

Fabio Zanini

A/Prof Fabio Zanini Fabio Zanini is an Associate Professor in the School of Clinical Medicine at UNSW, where he has led a group since 2019 applying computational and single-cell approaches across severe dengue, neonatal lung disease, cancer and marine biology. He trained at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and then at Stanford on the single-cell biology of viral disease, and is a prolific open-source developer, with tools including northstar for classifying cells against reference atlases and HTSeq 2.0.

• Fabio Zanini's website

Joseph Powell

Professor Joseph Powell is Director of Translational Genomics at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and Director of the Cellular Genomics Futures Institute at UNSW Sydney. His research focuses on understanding how genetic variation shapes cellular function and contributes to human disease. His group develops and applies statistical genetics, single-cell genomics and multi-omic approaches to large human cohorts, with particular emphasis on identifying cell-type-specific mechanisms of disease risk and therapeutic targets. He leads the TenK10K program, which integrates population-scale single-cell profiling with whole-genome sequencing to map the genetic regulation of human cellular phenotypes. His broader research spans functional genomics, complex trait genetics, and experimental validation, aiming to translate insights from human genetic variation into mechanistic understanding and new therapeutic opportunities.

• Joseph Powell's website

Silvia Velasco

A/Prof Silvia Velasco, MCRI Silvia Velasco is an Associate Professor and Group Leader of the Neural Stem Cell Laboratory at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne, and a principal investigator at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine (ReNEW). In Paola Arlotta's group at the Broad Institute she established a method for generating highly reproducible brain organoids, a model that has since driven mechanistic insight into cell-type-specific defects in autism spectrum disorder. Her lab builds pluripotent stem cell-derived 3D organoid models of the human brain to study and advance treatments for neurodevelopmental disorders.