October 8, 2020
1st Annual GCC Single Cell Omics Symposium
This conference will utilize the Brella interactive conference/networking platform. Instructions for joining the conference as well as how to utilize the networking platform will be emailed to registrants ~ 1 week prior to conference day.
Organizers: Rui Chen, Nicolas Navin, Luay Nakhleh, Hongyu Miao, Zhongming Zhao
Keynote Speakers:
Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen
Broad Institute
Stanford University
Confirmed Local Speakers:
Lukas Simon
Baylor College of Medicine
Koichi Takahashi
MD Anderson Cancer Center
MD Anderson Cancer Center
University of Houston
H. Courtney Hodges
Baylor College of Medicine
Ruli Gao
Houston Methodist
Single-cell omics is a rapidly growing new field that provides many advantages over traditional “bulk” tissue profiling techniques, such as the ability to resolve intra-tissue heterogeneity in cell types, profile the disease microenvironments, and study rare sub-populations. Over the last several years, single-cell genomic and transcriptomic methods have had major impact on many areas of biomedical research. In addition, other omics approaches such as chromatin profiling, DNA methylation, and proteomics have been under rapid development. Together, these single-cell omics technologies are becoming essential tools that are revolutionizing many diverse fields of biomedical and biological research. However, development of such technologies and methods requires multidisciplinary teams with expertise in bioengineering, chemistry, biomedical science, computational biology, among others. Furthermore, most single-cell omics methods are difficult to apply and are restricted to expert laboratories that have specialized skills and equipment. Critically, the resulting large-scale data sets are challenging to analyze, which requires expertise in bioinformatics, computational biology, statistics, and data science.
To address these challenges, and to leverage the tremendous complementary expertise that exists at TMC, the Gulf Coast Cluster for Single Cell Omics (GCC SCOC) was established in 2019. This first Annual GCC SCOC Symposium is designed to bring together local community that share the common interests in single cell technologies. The symposium targets the groups with diverse backgrounds ranging from developers to users of the single cell technologies. The meeting features sessions on technical advances in single cell protocols, computational methods for data analysis and modeling, and single cell technology application in various fields such as cancer, development, neuroscience, and functional genomics. In addition to invited keynote and local speakers, oral presentations will be selected from submitted abstracts. With the poster session, there are ample opportunities for participants, including trainee, to present and discuss their work. By fostering close interactions and active discussion among practitioners from many disciplines and from both academia and industry, we aim to foster interaction and collaboration among local researcher groups whose research is related to single cell biology.
