Helen Barton Lecture Series
2026-01-28 16:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Petty Science Building Room 150, 317 College Ave, Greensboro, North Carolina, 27412
Professor Zixuan Cang, North Carolina State University

Title: Optimal Transport and Topological Data Analysis for single-cell biology

Abstract: Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data examines high-throughput gene expression profiles at fine resolutions providing an unprecedented opportunity to elucidate the underlying complex biological processes. Optimal transport and Topological Data Analysis has proven to be an effective tool for exploiting complex structures in high-dimensional data. In this talk, we will discuss several optimal transport variants motivated by the biological applications, where there are detailed application-specific constraints, multiple distribution species, and multiple embedding spaces of the same system. We will illustrate the applications of these tools for addressing multi-compatible molecular species in cell-cell communication analysis and devising coherent trajectories of the same biological system from multi-omics datasets. We will also discuss some applications of topological data analysis to single-cell data analysis.
