Dartmouth Events

Roser Vento-Tormo’s research interest is to understand the influence of cellular microenvironments on individual cellular identities and responses, in the context of development and immunity. Her team (https://ventolab.org/) employs single-cell and spatial transcriptomics methods to deconstruct the cell signals in human organs and tissues, and utilise this information to inform the reconstruction of novel in vitro models. Essential for this work, is the novel computational tools her team develops to build cell–cell interactions networks from transcriptomics data. In her predoctoral research, she studied the interplay between cell signalling and epigenetic machinery key to regulating cellular fate decisions in myeloid cells. She pursued her postdoctoral studies in the Teichmann laboratory as an EMBO / HFSP fellow, where she developed CellPhoneDB.org, a computational tool to study cell-cell communication from single-cell transcriptomics data. She used CellPhoneDB to disentangle the complex communication between maternal and fetal cells in the uterine-placental interface during early human pregnancy. Vento-Tormo work has been funded by many recognised international agencies (H2020, MRC, CZI, Wellcome-LEAP), and she has recently obtained the Early Career Research Award from the Biochemistry Society (2021).