SEMINAR 2025
Characterizing the Dynamics of Cell State Transitions
| Speaker | Weikang Wang, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China |
| Date/Time | Friday, 7 Feb, 11am |
| Location | S11-02-07 |
| Moderator | Prof Yan Jie |
Abstract
All mature individuals develop from a single embryonic stem cell. One of the most fascinating questions in life sciences is how cells, as high-dimensional complex systems, achieve such precise self-organized regulation. The developmental process involves various forms of cell state transitions, which also occur widely in other physiological processes, such as cancer metastasis. With advancements in technology and the accumulation of experimental data, it has become increasingly possible to quantitatively study cell state transitions. However, many important questions have also emerged, such as:
- How can cell states be quantified?
- How to define the manifolds of cell state transitions
- Do different cell state transition processes share common dynamics and statistical properties?
With these questions in mind, the talk will focus on the research progress on cell state transitions based on a data-driven paradigm.
Biography
Wang Weikang is an associate professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He obtained his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from the School of Physics at Peking University in 2009 and 2015, respectively. Subsequently, he conducted postdoctoral research in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. His research areas include biophysics, computational and systems biology. His current research interests involve the dynamics of cell state transitions, the statistical physical properties of gene regulatory networks and neural networks, and the development of machine learning methods to analyze gene regulatory networks.