Takis Benos

Right before Thanksgiving, Daniel defended his PhD thesis, entitled “Causal graph methods for heterogeneous data and application to MUC1 cancer vaccine response”. Daniel joined our group 5 years ago and has worked on causal modeling algorithms both from the computational and the application standpoint. He will soon move to Maryland…

Takis received today the William Bushnell Presidential Chair from Dean Beth Virnig. Takis was among 24 distinguished colleagues across colleges that received endowed chairs.  This is a great honor!      …

Congratulations to Tyler Lovelace for the acceptance of his first co-author Placenta paper, which is entitled “Defining trophoblast injury patterns in the transcriptomes of dysfunctional placentas“. In this paper, Tyler analyzed comics data to identify potential molecular mechanisms through which trophoblast injury can cause placenta dysfunction. This is a collaborative short communications paper,…

Congratulations to Minxue Jia, Khaled Sayed, and Maria Kapetanaki for the acceptance of their joint first author Aging Cell paper, which is entitled “LEF1 isoforms regulate cellular senescence and aging“. In this paper, our group analyzed scRNA-seq data from immune cells from human and mouse lungs (young and aged) and bulk RNA-seq data from human…

 Today, Feng presented elegantly his PhD thesis work during the past 6+ years in Dario Vignali’s lab. I was very lucky to co-advise him and have him participating in our group’s activities. His PhD thesis is entitled “integrated BATF transcriptional network regulates suppressive intratumoral regulatory T cells.”  You can…

Takis gave an invited talk and met with colleagues at the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA). The title of the talk was “Going beyond associations: causal modeling in multi-scale medical research”.  …

Congratulations to Tyler Lovelace for the acceptance of his first co-author BMC Medicine paper, which is entitled “Integrated unbiased multiomics defines disease-independent placental clusters in common obstetrical syndromes”. In this paper, Tyler analyzed placental-derived multi-comics datasets (mRNA, miRNA, proteins, metabolites) from pregnant women with different pregnancy abnormalities: preeclampsia, fetal growth restriction, spontaneous preterm…

Congratulations to Robert Gregg for the acceptance of his AJRCCM paper (“Blue journal”), which is entitled “Early Evidence of COPD Obscured by Race-Specific Prediction Equations”. This paper examines the impact of race-specific equations in the determination of the COPD disease status and severity. The main finding is that current race-specific equations underestimate the…

Congratulations to Minxue Jia for the acceptance of his first author Aging Cell paper, which is entitled “Transcriptional Changes of the Aging Lung”. In this paper, Minxue analyzed lung scRNA-seq data from carefully selected healthy donors across life span (19-78 yrs old). Some of the samples were the controls from existing publications, whereas…

Congratulations to Feng Shan for the acceptance of his first author Science Immunology paper, which is entitled “Integrated BATF transcriptional network regulates suppressive intratumoral regulatory T cells”. In this paper, Feng analyzes scRNA-seq data to uncover the transcriptional programs that control intratumoral Treg gene expression. This is a collaboration with Dr. Dario Vignali lab…