Xuyu Qian

We also welcome:
•Rotation PhD students admitted to or enrolled in the BGS at Penn Perelman School of Medicine
•Undergraduate students in the Philadelphia area interested in volunteering
Please directly email qianlabrecruit@gmail.com to inquire.

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow - Neurology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America | Fellows, Students & Interns at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Apply for Post-Doctoral Research Fellow - Neurology job with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Fellows, Students & Interns at Children’s Hosp...

In case QR codes don't work. Apply here:
Postdoc 👉 careers.chop.edu/us/en/job/10...
Technician 👉 careers.chop.edu/us/en/job/10...
Questions? Email qianlabrecruit@gmail.com

🚨 We’re hiring! Please repost to spread the words!
The Qian Lab (@CHOP & @pennmedicine.bsky.social) is recruiting Postdocs and Research Technicians to study human brain development & neurodevelopmental disorders.
📍Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | 🧠 organoids, spatial omics, cerebral cortex

Honored to be featured in Genomic Press's Rising Stars series! @genomicpress.bsky.social ✨
In this very personal interview, I share the path that led me to neuroscience🧠, the anime that changed my life, and what drives my research.
📰 Read it here: doi.org/10.61373/gp0...

Congrats!🥳 For people from China/India, there's a wait due to annual country caps. So even if our EB1A was approved, we couldn't get the green card until the "priority date" is current.

Approved sounds like still 18 months wait ahead... speaking from my experience in 2018-2020.

We’ll be recruiting at all levels! If you're interested, feel free to reach out at qianlabrecruit@gmail.com. Official position postings will be shared soon—stay tuned! 🧠🧑🏻‍🔬🧑🏽‍🔬🧑🏾‍💻👩🏼‍🔬👨🏿‍💻🔬

My lab will explore how the human cerebral cortex develops—and what goes wrong in neurodevelopmental disorders—by combining human-based approaches such as brain organoids and spatial omics. 🧬🧠

I'm thrilled to share that I will be starting my independent lab this winter as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the new BRIDGE Center at CHOP and @pennmedicine.bsky.social Grateful for the support from mentors, collaborators, and friends—excited for what's ahead! 🧠✨

Huge thanks to our great team. Bioinformatics: Kyle, Shunzhou, and Chunyu from @drmingyaoli.bsky.social lab @pennmedicine.bsky.social ; cell segmentation: @computingnature.bsky.social ; NIHNeuroBioBank; Chris for wonderful mentorship, and other members of Walsh lab.

Seeing is believing- Our study emphasizes the synergistic analysis of molecular and spatial data, yielding insights unattainable through traditional methodologies, and setting the paradigm for a comprehensive spatial developmental atlas of the human brain.

🧠 Also, the six-layer structure of the cortex is detectable by gestational week 22 from excitatory neuron subtypes, despite no visible lamination.

We discovered two distinct modes of cortical areal specification during mid-gestation:
1️⃣ A gradual transition across most cortical regions
2️⃣ A sharp boundary between primary (V1) and secondary (V2) visual cortices, is visible at GW20, long before morphological differences appear.

Spatial transcriptomics reveals human cortical layer and area specification - Nature Multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) together with deep-learning-based nucleus segmentation enabled the construction of a highly detailed and informative spatially res...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today in @nature.com , we report a spatial single-cell atlas of human cortical development, revealing surprisingly early specification of human cortical layers and areas.
We built an interactive browser to explore the spatial data: walshlab.org/research/cor...
Paper link below 👇

POV: "Having too much single-cell data but don't know what to do about it."

Each of those is a 5TB hard drive.
Happy Easter! 🎉 🎉

Human-chimpanzee tetraploid system defines mechanisms of species-specific neural gene regulation A major challenge in human evolutionary biology is to pinpoint genetic differences that underlie human-specific traits, such as increased neuron number and differences in cognitive behaviors. We used human-chimpanzee tetraploid cells to distinguish gene expression changes due to cis -acting sequence variants that change local gene regulation, from trans expression changes due to species differences in the cellular environment. In neural progenitor cells, examination of both cis and trans changes – combined with CRISPR inhibition and transcription factor motif analyses – identified cis -acting, species-specific gene regulatory changes, including to TNIK , FOSL2 , and MAZ , with widespread trans effects on neurogenesis-related gene programs. In excitatory neurons, we identified POU3F2 as a key cis -regulated gene with trans effects on synaptic gene expression and neuronal firing. This study identifies cis -acting genomic changes that cause cascading trans gene regulatory effects to contribute to human neural specializations, and provides a general framework for discovering genetic differences underlying human traits. ### Competing Interest Statement C.A.W. is on the SAB of Bioskyrb Genomics (cash, equity) and Mosaica Therapeutics (cash, equity), and is an advisor to Maze Therapeutics (equity), but these have no relevance to this work. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

We just posted two preprints on uncovering the genetic bases of species-specific differences in neural progenitors, excitatory neurons, and upon neuronal stimulation using the human-chimpanzee tetraploid system. Please check them out!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share our latest preprint, presenting a multi-omic human neural organoid cell atlas of the posterior brain! 🧠🔬
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Great work with @hsiuchuanlin.bsky.social @zhisonghe.bsky.social @graycamplab.bsky.social and Barbara Treutlein!

Recurrent patterns of widespread neuronal genomic damage shared by major neurodegenerative disorders Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and Alzheimer's disease (AD) are common neurodegenerative disorders for which the mechanisms driving neuronal death remain unclear. ...

We uncovered a shared pattern of neuronal somatic mutations across ALS, FTD, and AD.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Huge thanks to co-first authors Joe Luquette & @guanlandong.bsky.social , and everyone in the Park, Lagier-Tourenne, Lee, and Walsh labs!

Crowd at Lincoln memorial

The @standupforscience.bsky.social DC rally is on.

What we are hearing from around the country:
"this is big!"
"biggest rally I have seen around here in years and years"

The public cares about medical research--and students, GenZ, and other people too are ready to stand up.

We are creating a web browser for our MERFISH data with spatial visualization for cell types and gene expression.
Here's the link for a teaser of one sample -human prefrontal cortex at gestational week 20-, with 50+ more to come: webatlas.cog.sanger.ac.uk/dev/index.ht...

Finally joined Bluesky! Reposting our preprint on spatial single-cell analysis of human cortical development! We used #MERFISH to analyze 16 million cells, revealing surprisingly early prenatal specification of human cortical layers and areas. t.co/EzAgvJdvaw

This poll is probably the most effective ad.