Lab News
Lab Presentations at AACR – Chicago 2025
Anqi presented her poster identifying potential anti-tumoral neutrophil phenotypes using scRNA-Seq for Head and Neck cancer mouse models across different immunotherapies. Josh presented his poster evaluating immune response phenotypes for combined radiation and immune checkpoint …
May 3, 2025Athena was highlighted in the CGSI Spring 2025 news edition
Student Highlight: Athena Golfinos-Owens – Analyzing the tumor microenvironment
February 10, 2025Athena presents at the Thomas Waldmann Memorial Plenary Session: Understanding Response and Resistance – Lessons from Patient Samples (SITC 2024)
Athena presented her winning abstract, selected by the leaders in the cancer immunotherapy field, on the topic of analyzing patient samples from immunotherapy treatment. Congratulations and well-done!
November 11, 2024Huy presents at Advancing Precision Medicine Symposium 2024
Huy presents our single-cell and spatial analysis at Advancing Precision Medicine Symposium 2024.
October 7, 2024Hien joined as a a postdoctoral research associate
Hien Pham joined us as a postdoc working on neutrophil heterogeneity in inflammation and cancers. She will lead our effort to characterize neutrophils in human burns. Welcome!
September 4, 2024Athena presented two talks selected from abstracts at WI Immunology and MidWest TME 2024
Athena presented two talks: single-cell and spatial analysis of T-myeloid cell interactions in Head and Neck cancer immunotherapy (Wisconsin Immunology 2024 at WID) and integrated omics analysis of anal and pre-cancer TME (MidWest Tumor Microenvironment …
May 23, 2024Lab Presentations – April 2024
Athena presented the single-cell analysis of squamous cell carcinoma at the CMP seminar and a poster about vulvar cancer at UWCCC Cancer Retreat 2024. Zhili presented a poster of single-cell analysis of iPSC-derived neutrophils at …
April 17, 2024Zhili Chen joins the lab to pursue neutrophil fate studies in burn
Zhili Chen from the Cellular and Molecular Biology (CMB) program joined our lab as a joint PhD student with Anna Huttenlocher’s lab. Zhili will study the fates of neutrophil heterogeneity in burns using zebrafish models. …
December 10, 2023Lab Presentations at Autumn Immunology Conference (AIC) 2023 in Chicago
Athena, Parth, Anqi, and Josh presented talks and posters about single-cell and spatial analysis of tumor immune cells at the 51st AIC conference in Chicago last weekend. Josh won the AAI Young Investigator Award for …
November 20, 2023Huy speaks at 2023 Wisconsin Epigenetic symposium
October 23, 2023Huy speaks at GLIIFCA 2023 as an invited speaker
September 9, 2023Summer students joining the lab
This summer, we welcomed 4 summer students joining the lab: Eric Zhou from Minnesota via the BDS SROP program, studying computational evaluation of cell-cell interactions in scRNA-Seq and spatial RNA-Seq. Alondra M. Colon Vega from …
June 5, 2023Former and current undergraduate students won prestigious fellowship
Sophia Ibargüen, a former MSTP summer scholar, won NIH’s Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award. Alicia Tee won the prestigious NSF REU program in Medical Informatics (13% acceptance rate) this summer. Congratulations!
April 3, 2023Josh became a dissertator, Parth and Zach joined the lab
Josh passed the preliminary exam and became a dissertator working on ovarian and colorectal cancer projects. Congratulations! Parth will officially be a joint PhD student co-supervised by Christina Kendziorski for his BDS PhD projects. Zach …
December 1, 2022Anqi joins the lab for her PhD study
Anqi Gao officially joined the lab after her summer rotation from the MSTP program. She finished her 3rd year at medical school and will join the CMP graduate program as a Ph.D. student. Anqi will …
July 12, 2022- More Lab_Personel_Presentations posts
Graduate student Athena won AACR scholar-in-training award for her abstract in characterizing vulvar tumor microenvironment!
This is Athena’s 2nd AACR award, congratulations!
April 24, 2025Undergrad student Sananda won research fellowships
Sananda won the 2025 L&S Honors Summer Research Apprenticeship Award & 2025-2026 Sophomore Research Fellowship for her neutrophil activating therapies project in head and neck cancers under the supervision of grad student Anqi. Congratulations to …
April 15, 2025Athena won Young Investigator Abstract Travel Award and Oral Abstract Presentation at the SITC 39th Annual Meeting
Grad student Athena won the travel award for an oral presentation at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society of ImmunoTherapy for Cancer meeting. She will present her spatial and single-cell analysis of Head and …
October 17, 2024Athena won Minter Graduate Cancer Research Award
Graduate student Athena was awarded the 2024 Thomas and Bonnie Minter Graduate Student Cancer Research Award to support her PhD thesis. Congratulations.
July 1, 2024Single-cell map of burn wound using larval zebrafish model is published in Journal of Immunology!
Our work, led by Yiran and Parth, employed integrated bioinformatics analyses of 6,495 neutrophils and 12,623 macrophages from scRNA-Seq of larval zebrafishes in both no-wound and burn conditions across 3 timepoints and mapped zebrafish neutrophil …
June 26, 2024Josh’s paper, characterizing immune microenvironment of fallopian tubes and their impacts to ovarian cancer, is published.
We employed a data science approach to reanalyze 88 scRNA-Seq datasets across 58 donors, including FTs, HGSC tumors, and relevant adjacent and normal tissues. Integrated bioinformatics analysis on the comprehensive datasets led to the following …
January 26, 2024Our joint paper identifying CD79b+ neutrophils is published
Together with Melissa Meyer from Lynn Hedrick’s lab at La Jolla Institute, we have identified a novel neutrophil state (marked by B cell marker CD79b) associated with the early stage of human melanoma.
November 7, 2023Commentary paper from the 2022 Irving cancer immunology symposium published.
Huy co-authored a paper about lessons discussed at the 2nd Irving Cancer Immunology Conference, which brought together young scientists and leaders of the field in Boston in the summer of 2022.
November 1, 2023We are awarded MIRA R35 from NIGMS to study neutrophil heterogeneity in wound healing.
Our lab is officially funded by NIH. The countless efforts from all lab members and wonderful collaborators during the pandemic in the last three years paid off. We are recruiting postdocs to generate new data …
July 26, 2023Collaborative AAI 2023 Intersect Fellowship for Computational Scientists and Immunologists awarded
Our collaborative project led by Yiran Hou, a postdoc in Anna Huttenlocher’s lab, has been funded. AAI Intersect Fellowship is designed to get a wet/dry lab postdoc to work in the interface of both fields …
March 18, 2023Skin Diseases Research Center pilot project awarded
We are excited to be awarded a pilot grant to study the roles of neutrophil heterogeneity in burn injury at the Skin Diseases Research Center at the University of Wisconsin (UWSDRC).
March 16, 2023Wisconsin Immunomodulatory Targeted Radionuclide Therapy (ITRT) Program pilot project awarded
We are awarded to study the roles of neutrophils in immunomodulatory targeted radionuclide therapy from the Wisconsin ITRT Program Project Grant in Head and Neck cancer. We are excited to join the community of Multi-disciplinary …
July 25, 2022Josh was awarded a CMP T32 fellowship
Josh was selected to be an NIH Trainee in the Cellular and Molecular Training Program for the school year of 2022-2023! Congrats! Thanks to the support from the National Institute Of General Medical Sciences of …
June 10, 2022Our joint paper with the Lambert lab defining the role of K17 and immune landscapes of head and neck cancer immunotherapy published in Clinical Cancer Research
Together with Paul Lambert’s lab, we identified the roles of K17 contribution in HNC immunotherapy and the immune landscape switch from “cold tumors” to “hot tumors” using scRNA-Seq. The work was led by Wei Wang …
May 27, 2022Our collaborative paper in scRNA-Seq of EBV lines published in PLoS Pathogens
Our collaborative work with Shannon Kenney’s lab used scRNA-Seq to identify the roles of IRF4 in type 2 EBV lytic induction was out in PloS Pathogens. Josh is the 2nd author leading the scRNA-Seq analysis. …
May 1, 2022Our scRNA-Seq analysis of esophageal cancers is published in Nature Communications
In collaboration with Dr. Dechen Lin’s lab at Cedars Sinai Medical Center and scientists from the Shantou University Medical College, we used scRNA-Seq to characterize the tumor microenvironment of esophageal squamous carcinoma and identified CST1+ …
December 28, 2021Our collaborative paper, quantifying iso-form expression for scRNA-Seq, out in Bioinformatics!
We contributed as a co-author to the publication of the Scasa method, developed by Trung Nghia Vu group at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, the first method to estimate isoform-level expression for 10X single-cell RNA-Seq.
December 6, 2021Athena and Josh won the travel awards
Athena will go to AACR 2022 to present her work on head and neck cancer myeloid cells. Josh will go to AAI 2022 to present his work on fallopian tube immune cells. Both got travel …
October 24, 2021UWCCC Transdisciplinary Cancer Immunology-Immunotherapy Pilot Project awarded
We are awarded a pilot grant to search for a biomarker for the response to immunotherapy in combination with radiation in liver metastatic colorectal cancer patients, together with Dr. Dusty Deming. The award is based …
October 12, 2021Aisha was awarded CIBM fellowship!
Aisha’s application was awarded for a CIBM Postdoctoral fellowship from the NLM training grant to the Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine (CIBM) Training Program at UW-Madison. She will study isoform expression and cell-cell …
September 1, 2021- More Papers_Funding posts