🚨 We’re hiring! Please repost to spread the words!
The Qian Lab (@CHOP & @pennmedicine.bsky.social) is recruiting Postdocs and Research Technicians to study human brain development & neurodevelopmental disorders.
📍Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | 🧠 organoids, spatial omics, cerebral cortex

My lab will explore how the human cerebral cortex develops—and what goes wrong in neurodevelopmental disorders—by combining human-based approaches such as brain organoids and spatial omics. 🧬🧠

I'm thrilled to share that I will be starting my independent lab this winter as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the new BRIDGE Center at CHOP and @pennmedicine.bsky.social Grateful for the support from mentors, collaborators, and friends—excited for what's ahead! 🧠✨

🧠 Also, the six-layer structure of the cortex is detectable by gestational week 22 from excitatory neuron subtypes, despite no visible lamination.

We discovered two distinct modes of cortical areal specification during mid-gestation:
1️⃣ A gradual transition across most cortical regions
2️⃣ A sharp boundary between primary (V1) and secondary (V2) visual cortices, is visible at GW20, long before morphological differences appear.

Today in @nature.com , we report a spatial single-cell atlas of human cortical development, revealing surprisingly early specification of human cortical layers and areas.
We built an interactive browser to explore the spatial data: walshlab.org/research/cor...
Paper link below 👇

POV: "Having too much single-cell data but don't know what to do about it."

Each of those is a 5TB hard drive.
Happy Easter! 🎉 🎉

We are creating a web browser for our MERFISH data with spatial visualization for cell types and gene expression.
Here's the link for a teaser of one sample -human prefrontal cortex at gestational week 20-, with 50+ more to come: webatlas.cog.sanger.ac.uk/dev/index.ht...

Finally joined Bluesky! Reposting our preprint on spatial single-cell analysis of human cortical development! We used #MERFISH to analyze 16 million cells, revealing surprisingly early prenatal specification of human cortical layers and areas. t.co/EzAgvJdvaw