Judith and David Coffey Seminar: Prof Christine Wells, University of Melbourne

Jointly Hosted jointly by the Judith and David Coffey Life Lab in the Charles Perkins
Centre and the Sydney Precision Data Science Centre 

Title: The secret sauce - building insights from integrated atlas of human biology 

Speaker: Prof Christine Wells (University of Melbourne) 

Abstract: The human cell atlas is a global consortium seeking to build a detailed map of
cell types through developmental time, health and disease states.  Molecular snapshots
of individual cells can be taken at many measurement levels, and the expectation is that
integrating multiple modalities will lead to new discoveries about human cell
development and behaviour.  Data integration at this scale requires two main
considerations – the first is statistical models to remove experimental artefacts and
harmonise informative signals ; the second is curation of the metadata to identify
possible technical, experimental or even biological confounders.  We often pay a lot of
attention to the first challenge, at the expense of minimizing or ignoring the second,
simply because data curation is difficult, and often requires biological expertise that
sits outside of our own groups.  

In this talk, I’ll introduce generative AI driven tools developed by my own team for
stem cell curation, as well as provide a preview of the community-driven curation
platforms being lead out of the Human Cell Atlas consortium and provide some examples of
how these tools are supporting high quality data integration and the creation of new
cell atlases.  

About the speaker: Professor Christine Wells is chair of stem cell systems at the
University of Melbourne.  She uses computational models to understand human stem cell
behaviour, and pluripotent stem cell models to test these computational predictions.
Christine graduated with a PhD from UQ in 2004, and established her first laboratory at
Griffith University in 2005.  Over the past 20 years, her team has built several human
cell atlases describing immune cell subsets, then uses these atlases to benchmark lab
grown immune cells, and have invented new protocols to make specialist immune cells in
the laboratory.  Christine has authored over 150 papers, collectively cited >30,000
times.  She is a member of several international consortia including the Functional
Annotation of the Mammalian genome (FANTOM), the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) and the equity
working group for the International Society for Stem Cell Research.  Christine is the
architect of the Stemformatics data collaboration platform and academic lead of the
Australian stem cell registry.  

In-person venue: Mackenzie Seminar Room, Level 6, CPC 

Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/85114748391