Charting the inaccessible windows of human development through single-cell atlases and evolutionary transfer learning
Lecture date: October 8, 2026
Jay Shendure, MD, PhD
Professor
University of Washington
Most human cell types — and the contexts in which pediatric cancers arise — emerge during embryonic, fetal, and pediatric development, windows that are largely inaccessible to comprehensive molecular profiling. In this talk, I will describe how single-cell atlases of mammalian development, together with deep learning models that exploit evolutionary information, are enabling us to reconstruct development as a continuous film rather than a static blueprint, and to predict the activity of regulatory sequences in human cellular contexts we cannot directly observe.
