School of Biomedical Sciences cordially invites you to join the following seminar:

Speaker: Professor Rong Fan, Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Pathology, School of Medicine, Yale University
Talk Title: Ushering in a new era of human biology driven by novel spatial multi-omics

Date: 17 July 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Venue: HKJC-S1A, G/F, The HKJC Bldg for Interdisciplinary Research, 5 Sassoon Road 
Host: Professor Mu He

Biography

Professor Rong Fan is the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Pathology at Yale University. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology before joining Yale University’s faculty in 2010. Prof. Fan’s research focuses on developing single-cell and spatial omics technologies to investigate functional cellular heterogeneity and intercellular signaling networks in human health and disease. He is a co-founder of IsoPlexis, Singleron Biotechnologies, and AtlasXomics and has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of Bio-Techne.  His contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the National Cancer Institute’s Howard Temin Career Transition Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He is an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE), and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Abstract

Understanding complex human biology is challenging due to the limitations of model organisms and clinical specimens. Our laboratory is pioneering a new era in this field with novel spatial multi-omics technologies. We first introduced DBiT (Liu Y, et al., Cell, 2020) for co-mapping the transcriptome and proteins, and subsequently developed the first spatial epigenome sequencing methods like spatial-ATAC-seq (Deng Y, et al., Nature, 2022) and spatial-CUT&Tag (Deng Y, et al., Science, 2022). Our latest breakthrough, Patho-DBiT (Bai Z, et al., Cell, 2024), enables comprehensive RNA profiling in archived formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues. This platform spatially analyzes diverse RNAs, splicing isoforms, and single-nucleotide variants. It dissects tumor architecture, cellular dynamics, and regulatory networks in human cancers directly from patient samples. These tools unlock deep mechanistic insights from clinical trial biospecimens, heralding a new era for human biology and precision health. 

All are welcome.