PQG Seminar

The goal of the PQG Seminar Series is to promote interaction, collaboration, and research in quantitative genomics.  The series seeks to further the development and application of quantitative methods, especially for high dimensional data, as well as focus on the training of quantitative genomic scientists.

2026/2027 Seminar Organizers: Rong Ma and Junwei Lu

Please direct any logistical questions to Amanda King

Note: Harvard Chan School seeks to bring in speakers with a wide range of experiences and perspectives. They’re here to share their own insights; they do not speak for the school or the university.

All PQG seminar meetings for the semester will be held in person unless otherwise noted.

Upcoming Seminar

Tuesday, September 15, 2026 
1:00 -2:00 PM
Biostats Conference  Room 2-426

Tao Wang
Associate Professor, Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Interpretable AI Model Reveals Spatial Codes of Cell Recruitment in Tissues

Understanding which molecular signals recruit specific cells to precise tissue locations is fundamental to tissue biology, immunity, and disease. Existing computational tools for spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) describe where cells reside but cannot explain why. Here we introduce SPACER, a fully interpretable multi-instance learning framework that decodes gene-level recruitment rules directly from SRT data. Applied to 37 SRT datasets spanning multiple human tumor types and mouse heart, SPACER achieved 4-21 fold improvement over existing methods in various tasks of recovering biologically meaningful recruitment signals. SPACER revealed (1) that tumor-expressed mucins are associated with physical barriers to T cells engagement, which predicts resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) and patient prognosis, (2) that local antigen presentation is the dominant correlate of T cell engagement across cancer types, and (3) that Cd4⁺ T cells are the dominant functional effectors in severe ICI-induced myocarditis. These findings establish SPACER as a discovery engine for cellular recruitment biology with direct translational applications.