Welcome to the Welch Lab

Our research aims to address fundamental problems in both biomedical research and computer science by developing new tools tailored to rapidly emerging high-throughput sequencing technologies. Broadly, we seek to understand what genes define the complement of cell types and cell states within healthy tissue, how cells differentiate to their final fates, and how dysregulation of genes within specific cell types contributes to human disease. As computational method developers, we seek to both employ and advance the methods of machine learning, particularly for unsupervised analysis of high-dimensional data.

Most recently, I have focused on developing open-source software for the processing, analysis, and modeling of single-cell sequencing data. Key contributions in this area include LIGER, a general approach for integrating single-cell transcriptomic, epigenomic and spatial transcriptomic data; online iNMF, a scalable and iterative algorithm for single-cell data integration; and MultiVelo, a tool for modeling cell fate transitions from single-cell multi-omic data. I have applied these methods in collaboration with biological scientists to study stem cell differentiation, somatic cell reprogramming, and the mammalian brain.

The Welch Lab has openings for multiple positions, including Postdoctoral Fellow, PhD Student, Bioinformatician, and Software Engineer! (more info)

News

September 17, 2025

Yuxuan's paper is published in Genome Biology

September 1, 2025

NIH/NIDA multi-PI R33 awarded to Collins and Welch labs

August 4, 2025

PerturbNet paper featured as cover article

July 17, 2025

UM press release highlights TopoVelo paper

July 16, 2025

Research briefing for TopoVelo paper is published in Nature Biotechnology

July 16, 2025

Yichen, Jialin, and Justin's paper is published in Nature Biotechnology

July 10, 2025

Hengshi and Weizhou's paper is published in Molecular Systems Biology

July 3, 2025

Second collaborative paper with Ono lab is published in Nature Communications

July 3, 2025

Collaborative paper with Ono lab is published in Nature Communications

... see all News