Hi, I'm Szen.

I currently live in Ashburn, Virginia in the US. I'm working as a Postdoctoral Scientist in the labs of Dr. Alejandro Aguilera-Castrejon (HHMI's Janelia Research Campus) and Sanjay Srivatsan (Fred Hutch Cancer Centre). During my PhD, I was supervised by Dr. Mathew Garnett and Dr. Sam Behjati at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton in the UK. Prior to my PhD, I completed medical school at the University of Sheffield and practiced medicine in the UK's National Health Service.

Key research areas of interest I'm actively involved in:

• Clonal selection, cellular plasticity, and memory. Cellular plasticity and mechanisms of cell fate decisions during early mammalian development.
• Single-cell profiling technologies. Development of highly multiplexed, single-cell co-assays.
• Perturbation data analysis and modeling. Computational strategies to analyse scRNA-seq perturbation datasets.

In my PhD, I identified regulators of cellular plasticity and treatment adaptation in KRAS-mutant colorectal cancer by applying combinatorial indexing technology to profile colorectal cancer organoids following targeted therapy at single-cell resolution. I also co-developed an atlas of colorectal cancer and linked to perturbation data to understand perturbations that drive cells toward defined phenotypic extremes.

More information about featured publications can be found in the page here. If you're interested in my work, please reach out to me!