Cheng Lab summer updates!

January 2025: Nikhil Jaglan and Rushil Patel joined the lab.

Nikhil is a rising Penn junior on the pre-medicine track bridging mathematics, healthcare, and business. In lab, he works on genotyping, immunohistochemistry, and other wet-lab techniques.

Rushil is a rising Penn sophomore studying computer science. His work in lab is analytical, using single-cell data to improve cell clustering methods and search for genetic markers for cells and disease conditions through retina, optic nerve and brain cells.

March 2025: Yuyan and Dr. Qi Cui were awarded a pilot grant from American Glaucoma Society to support our glaucoma omics work!

May 2025: Michael Ramirez joined the lab for summer research. He is a rising Penn sophomore studying computer science. His current work in the lab involves optimizing computer vision algorithms for cell segmentation.

May 2025: Kelly attended the 2025 ARVO conference, where she presented her work on the LNP project investigating the temporal and spatial distribution of LNP expression across the retina.

May 2025: The lab presented at this year’s Vision Science Symposium.

Kelly and Rachel showcased their LNP project together.

Gaby’s poster highlighted progress on the single-nucleus atlas of healthy and glaucomatous retina and optic nerve tissues from a mouse model of glaucoma.

Cass presented on her nuclei extraction optimization for murine retinal tissues to maximize nuclei yield and inherently obtain higher-quality gene reads.

June 2025: Rushil was awarded the CURF $5,000 Summer Research Funding grant to continue his research on spatial transcriptomics!

June 2025: Yuyan is selected as the NIA Butler-Williams Scholar and as a member of the NIH Early Career Reviewer Program!

July 2025: Marlene Probst joined the lab as a rotation student. Marlene is a Penn PhD student in Cell and Molecular Biology in the Gene Therapy and Vaccines subprogram. She will work on the LNP-CRISPR screen project for gene therapy targeting vision disorders.