Zhisong Jeff HE
何志嵩

I'm Zhisong Jeff He (何志嵩) working in Prof. Dr. Barbara Treutlein's group (Quantitative Developmental Biology) in ETH Zürich, D-BSSE, Basel, Switzerland as a senior scientific assistant and computational biologist; also a lecturer in ETH Zurich. My main research interest is to understand the molecular landscapes of cell state changes and the driven regulatory mechanisms during human central nervous system development, and to further apply the information for cell type engineering. I also work on developing and improving computational tools for the needed quantitative analysis.

Keywords

computational biology, developmental biology, cell type engineering, brain, organoid, a dad

 

Experiences

Born in Zhongshan, a small but beautiful city in Guangdong Province in China, I left to Hangzhou, the charming city where the West Lake located, in 2005, for my college in one of the top universities in China: Zhejiang University. After getting my bachelor (bioinformatics) in 2009, I started my PhD in CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai, working in Dr. Philipp Khaitovich's lab and mainly focusing on transcriptome evolution of primate brains. On Nov 19th 2014, I defended my thesis and got my PhD degree (computational biology), and since then continued to work with Philipp until Jan 2018. Afterwards I moved Leipzig, Germany to join to Dr. Barbara Treutlein's group as a postdoc in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. In Jan 2019, as Barbara moved to D-BSSE, ETH Zürich in Basel, Switzerland, I moved to Basel together with other colleagues in the group. Currently, my main research focus is to study human brain and retina development combining single-cell genomics and iPSC-derived brain and retinal organoids. I also work on developing computational tools and pipelines for single-cell genomic data analysis, especially multi-modal data integration.

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