Kathryn Hess Bellwald

Monday, April 7, 2025

4:00 - 5:00 pm (refreshments at 3:30 pm)

Broad Institute - Yellowstone (415 Main Street)

Or via YouTube Livestream: broad.io/ewsc

‍If you are attending in-person and do not have a Broad badge, please show up at the 415 Main Street entrance 10 minutes prior to the event to be escorted to the talk.

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Abstract: In this talk I will introduce CocycleHunter, a tool for identifying and exploiting circular structure in single-cell RNAseq data, based on persistent cohomology in dimension one. Our method produces a system of statistically enriching gene sets for circular structure and provides a powerful, cohomology-based technique for estimating the phase of genes exhibiting cyclic expression patterns (gene cascades), which has been validated on synthetic RNA transcription models, as well as on real datasets related to the cell cycle, tissue re-generation, and senescence in diverse experimental conditions.

This is joint work, led by Kelly Maggs and Markus Youssef, with the collaboration of Cyril Pulver, Jovan Isa, Tâm Nguyên, Wouter Karthaus, and Paolo Dotto.

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Biography: Kathryn Hess Bellwald received her PhD in algebraic topology from MIT and held positions at the universities of Stockholm, Nice, and Toronto before moving to the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she is now full professor of mathematics and life sciences. Her research focuses on algebraic topology and its applications, primarily in the life sciences, but also in materials science. In her work in applied topology, she has elaborated methods based on topological data analysis for high-throughput screening of nanoporous crystalline materials, classification and synthesis of neuron morphologies, and classification of neuronal network dynamics.  She has also developed and applied innovative topological approaches to network theory.

In 2016, she was elected to Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a distinguished speaker of the European Mathematical Society in 2017. In 2021, she gave an invited Public Lecture at the European Congress of Mathematicians. She was awarded the Chaire de la Vallée Poussin by the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve in 2023 and was named a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2024.

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This colloquium is part of a series hosted jointly by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Questions? Email Amanda Ogden at aogden@broadinstitute.org.