Spatial Biology

Dr. Andrea Radtke obtained her PhD from Johns Hopkins University and worked in the laboratory of Dr. Ronald Germain at the National Institutes of Health as a postdoctoral fellow and later as a Staff Scientist. Dr. Radtke specializes in advanced microscopy techniques including IBEX, a multiplexed antibody-based imaging method she co-developed. Dr. Radtke and her colleagues have used IBEX to create atlases of normal and malignant human lymph nodes as well as the human thymus. Dr. Radtke is passionate about open science and co-leads several community efforts within the field of spatial biology including the IBEX Imaging Community and Organ Mapping Antibody Panel initiative of the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program. As of August 2024, Dr. Radtke is a Principal Scientist at Leica Microsystems where she will continue to accelerate discovery through advances in spatial biology.

Dr. Leeat Keren is an assistant professor in the department of Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute of science. She completed her Ph.D. in computational biology in the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2016 and her postdoc with Dr. Michael Angelo in Stanford University in 2020. She is an Azrieli Faculty Fellow, a recipient of the Dale F. Frey breakthrough scientist award from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and a recipient of the James Heineman Research Award.

Bernd Bodenmiller is a quantitative biologist who develops novel experimental and computational approaches for the quantitative analysis of tumor ecosystems to improve our understanding of the mechanisms of tumor development for the benefit of patients. He is the founding director of the Department of Quantitative Biomedicine (DQBM) at the University of Zurich, which fosters research and education at the interface of biomedical research, biotechnology, and computational biology to guide development of next-generation precision medicine. Prof. Bodenmiller obtained his PhD in the group of Ruedi Aebersold at ETH Zürich. For his postdoctoral training, he joined the laboratory of Garry P. Nolan at Stanford University. In 2012, he became a group leader and in 2013 an SNF/ERC assistant professor at the University of Zürich. In 2019, he was tenured and became the founding director of the DQBM. In October 2020 Prof. Bodenmiller has been appointed as Dual Professor for Quantitative Biomedicine at the UZH and at ETH Zurich. His group pioneered the development of imaging mass cytometry, an approach that enables simultaneously imaging of over 40 proteins and transcripts in tumor tissues (Nat. Methods, 2014; Cell Systems, 2017; Nature 2020) and the histoCAT software toolbox (Nat. Methods, 2017). His groups applies these methods to unravel how cells in the tumor ecosystem drive cancer development to identify mechanisms that might be exploited for therapeutic targeting (Nat. Biotechnology, 2017, Cell, 2017; Cell, 2019).

Dr. Jeffrey Moffitt received his PhD in Physics from the University of California Berkeley, where, with Dr. Carlos Bustamante, he developed methods for monitoring the Angstrom-scale movement of molecular motors. He received postdoctoral training from Dr. Xiaowei Zhuang at Harvard University, where he co-developed multiplexed error robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH). His laboratory at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School leverages MERFISH to understand the role of spatial organization in commensal microbial communities and their interactions with their host. 

Sarah did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, and was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London. She started her group at the MRC-LMB in 2001, and moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus in 2013, where her group was joint between the EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. In 2016 she was appointed Head of the Cellular Genetics programme at the Sanger. Sarah is co-founder and co-leader of the international Human Cell Atlas consortium, which aims to create reference maps for cells across all human tissues and co-directs the CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human research programme. In 2024, Sarah took up a Chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge (Cambridge Stem Cell Institute & Dept Medicine).

Adyary Fallarero is a Sr. Manager within Product Management at the Division of Biosciences in the Life Sciences Solution Group. She earned a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Havana, Cuba and a Master in International Business Management (MBA) from the Tampere University of Applied Sciences, in Finland. Since 2010, she has been an Adjunct Professor in Pharmaceutical Biology at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki, Finland.

During her more than 10 years of academic career, she published over 70 peer-reviewed publications, supervised 10 doctoral and many postdoctoral researchers, co-authored over 10 patents, and led multiple research programs focused on early drug discovery of antimicrobials and inhibitors of bacterial biofilms. She was awarded grants from the European Union, the Academy of Finland and multiple private foundations across Scandinavia. In 2018, she received the prestigious Oskar Öflund’s Foundation Grand Prize, for her contributions to the development of the field of anti-infectives and anti-biofilms in Finland.

She joined Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2016 and has occupied multiple roles in the area of cell analysis instrumentation, which has allowed her to gain significant expertise in new product development and product management. Since 2021, she has been responsible for new product introductions, portfolio management and commercial enablement covering Cell and Tissue Imaging Systems.

Chris leads a cross-functional team developing sensors and labeling technologies for fluorescence-based detection and single cell analysis. Over the last 17 years, Chris has developed more than 100 novel reagents for fluorescence microscopy and flow cytometry with a focus on discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, and cell therapies. He currently manages a diverse portfolio of labeling and detection reagents, crosslinkers, and microspheres. His nearly 600 technical seminars and scientific trainings in over 40 countries have developed a trusted network of key opinion leaders who help guide product development and market adoption. Frequent engagement with global technology experts has led to many successful strategic collaborations and publications integrating reagents, assays, and instrumentation to demonstrate the complete cell analysis solution provided by Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Dr. Rong Fan is the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Pathology. His research interest has been centered on the development and deployment of single-cell and spatial omics technologies to investigate normal development, aging, and disease. He received a B.S. in Applied Chemistry from University of Science and Technology of China, a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, and then completed his postdoctoral training at California Institute of Technology, prior to joining the faculty of Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University in 2010. He developed a microchip that allows for simultaneous measurement of 42 immune effector proteins in single cells at high throughput, which remains the highest multiplexing to date for a single-cell protein secretion assay. In collaboration with Novartis and Kite Pharma, it was applied to profiling antigen-specific activation states of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-engineered T cells, resulting in the discovery of novel single-cell biomarkers including polyfunctional strength index to characterize the quality of CAR-T infusion products and predict the clinical responses and immune-related adverse effects(irAEs) prior to treatment. This microchip, called IsoCode, and the automation system, called IsoLight, have been commercialized by IsoPlexis, a company co-founded by Dr. Fan. Now, this system has been used by >100 major pharmaceutical companies and cancer centers around the world for monitoring CAR-T or checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapies. Dr. Fan is also a pioneer in developing NGS-based spatial omics sequencing technologies. He conceived the concept of spatial multi-omics and developed the first spatially resolved multi-omics sequencing technology called DBiT-seq (Liu et al., Cell 183, 1665–1681, 2020) which allows for spatial co-profiling of whole transcriptome and hundreds of proteins (spatial-CITE-seq) at cellular level in complex tissues. He further developed a first-of-its-kind technology to enable spatial epigenome sequencing including spatial-ATAC-seq (Deng et al., Nature 609 (7926), 375-383, 2022) and spatial-CUT&Tag (Deng et al., Science 375 (6581), 681-686, 2022). These technologies may unlock a whole new field in spatial biology with applications in a wide range of biological and biomedical research. Dr. Fan co-founded IsoPlexis, Singleron Biotechnologies, and AtlasXomics. He is the recipient of multiple awards including the NCI Howard Temin Career Transition Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He has been elected to American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE), and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).