Sahand Hormoz

Sahand Hormoz

Assistant Professor
Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School/ Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Associate Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard/ Affiliate Faculty, Harvard Stem Cell Institute
Sahand Hormoz Photo
The Hormoz lab’s mission is to control biological systems to understand life and cure disease.
We want to understand how different cell states emerge in diverse biological systems (viruses, bacteria, and mammalian cells) and use this knowledge to generate desired and even new cell states in a dish. For example, we try to generate blood stem cells from skin fibroblast cells and evolve viruses for gene therapy. To do so, we develop new technologies to measure the molecular states of single cells. These high throughput measurements create two challenges. First, the resulting data sets are high-dimensional and difficult to interpret. To understand the data, we use tools from differential geometry and machine learning. Second, high throughput measurements destroy the cells and provide only static snapshots. To obtain information about the dynamics, we use synthetic biology to engineer cells to record their histories in their own DNA. Finally, we develop organoid systems and microfluidic platforms to control cell states in vitro using the understanding obtained from the high throughput data. Ultimately, we aim to automate the process of measuring and modeling of biological systems so that our understanding and control of biology is not limited by human cognition.
 
Selected Publications:
 
KL Frieda*, JM Linton*, S Hormoz*, J Choi, KK Chow, ZS Singer, MW Budde, MB Elowitz, and L Cai.  Synthetic recording and in situ readout of lineage information in single cells.  Nature 541 (7635): 107-111 (2017). * equal contribution
 
S Hormoz*, ZS Singer*, JM Linton, YE Antebi, BI Shraiman,  MB Elowitz.  Inferring Cell-State Transition Dynamics from Lineage Trees and Endpoint Single-Cell Measurements.  Cell Systems 3 (5): 419-433 (2016). Featured on the cover. * equal contribution.
 
S Hormoz, N Desprat, BI Shraiman.  Inferring epigenetic dynamics from kin correlations.  PNAS 112, (18) E2281-E2289 (2015).
 
S Hormoz.  Cross talk and interference enhance information capacity of a signaling pathway. Biophysical Journal 104 (5), 1170-1180 (2013). Featured on the cover.

Contact Information

360 Longwood Avenue
Longwood Center Building,
9th Floor, Room 310 (LC-9310)
Boston, MA 02115
p: 617 582-7361

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