At this session we heard from the Biochemical Society's 2021 Early Career Research Award winner, Dr Roser Vento-Tormo at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK.

Dr Vento-Tormo completed her postdoctoral studies under the supervision of Professor Sarah Teichmann as an EMBO and HFSP fellow. Here she developed CellPhoneDB, a unique resource of ligands, receptors and their interactions, integrated with a statistical framework to build cellular communication networks from single-cell transcriptomics data. Dr Vento-Tormo has used this cutting-edge computational framework to study maternal-fetal communication during early pregnancy in humans. More broadly, CellPhoneDB has also been key to identifying cell-cell interactions mediating fundamental biological processes including hematopoiesis and the tumour microenvironment.

This webinar was chaired by Dr Charalampos (Babis) Rallis, Lecturer in Cellular Ageing at University of Essex, Honorary Lecturer at the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London and Associate Lecturer in Cell and Molecular Biology at Birkbeck College, University of London.