Western Bioinformatics Research Seminar Series

Time and date: 11:00am - 12:00pm (Toronto ET), Thursday, October 29, 2026, via Zoom

Speaker Name:

Rong Ma

Title/affiliation:

Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard University & Broad Institute

Presentation title:

Geometric Inference for Single-Cell and Spatial Omics

Learning objectives:

• Recognize examples of low-dimensional geometric structure in single-cell and spatial omics data, including manifolds, trajectories, and tissue coordinates.
• Formulate biological questions about cell states, tissue organization, and developmental dynamics as geometric inference problems.
• Understand how manifold learning and geometric inference can improve embedding reliability and spatial gene analysis.
• Use vector-field geometry to analyze RNA velocity and infer dynamic cellular processes on cell-state manifolds.

Speaker Bio: 

Rong Ma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with affiliated appointments at the Broad Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Harvard Data Science Initiative. His research focuses on developing principled statistical and machine learning methods for high-dimensional biological data, with particular interests in geometric inference, manifold learning, representation learning, and single-cell genomics. He develops reliable and interpretable approaches for studying cellular dynamics, developmental trajectories, and complex biological systems from noisy high-dimensional data.