IICD Newsletter April 2026

April 06, 2026
Stay Informed: IICD April 2026 News and Events 🔬
Herbert and Florence Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics Newsletter
April 6, 2026
 

 Applications are Open for the 2026 IICD Intensive Workshop

IICD is hosting a 5-day intensive workshop (July 6–10, 2026, Morningside Heights) designed for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows interested in probabilistic data integration and optimal transport. Participants will gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge topics including multi-modal single-cell data integration, probabilistic modeling, and spatial technologies, alongside lectures, problem sets, and networking opportunities. An optional virtual bootcamp on July 2 will help participants prepare. Applications are due April 10, 2026.
Learn More and Register

 Dr. Sanja Vicković: Envisioning the Future of Spatial Transcriptomics and Multi-omics 

Sanja Vicković and her lab advance spatial transcriptomics and multi-omics to better understand how cells coordinate in space to shape tissue function and disease. As Core Faculty at the New York Genome Center and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering (IICD) at Columbia, she leads the Vicković Lab in mapping gene activity and cellular interactions. By integrating RNA-sensing, imaging, and computational modeling, her group develops next-generation digital pathology tools to improve diagnostics and therapies for colorectal cancer patients.

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 Beyond the Algorithm: IICD Explores What's Next in AI 

On March 16, IICD hosted a half-day symposium titled “Next Generation Cancer Research – AI and Computation,” bringing together leading researchers to explore how advances in artificial intelligence are transforming cancer research. Speakers highlighted breakthroughs across fields—from adaptive genome regulation to generative AI models of cellular dynamics—demonstrating the growing impact of computational approaches in cancer dynamics. 

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IICD Seminar Series: April Seminar


Andrea Sottoriva Headshot
 


Measuring and Predicting Cancer Evolution with Population Genetics and Machine Learning
 
Hosted by: Sanja Vickovic, PhD
Date: April 8, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM (ET)
Location: Schermerhorn
Hall 603 and via Zoom

 
Register Here
Some seminars are recorded and available for viewing on the IICD YouTube channel.

IICD Highlights

Headshot Noah Bergam
Congratulations to Noah Bergam (Blumberg Group) on the acceptance of his paper, “t-SNE Exaggerates Clusters, Provably,” to the International Conference on Learning Representations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He will present a poster at the conference later this month. Read more.
 
Headshot Aidan Daly
Welcome to new IICD member, Aidan Daly, a Senior Computational Scientist in the Vicković Lab and at the New York Genome Center. Dr. Daly has specific expertise in the use of Bayesian modeling, computer vision, and graph learning to extract mechanistic insights from biopsy and postmortem tissue. Read more.
 
Headshot Ioana Lia
 
Congratulations to Ioana Lia (Azizi & McFaline-Figueroa groups) on receiving an IICD Travel Award to attend Fusion Conferences: 3rd Probing Human Disease using Single-Cell Technologies Conference, where she presented "Multi-omics characterization of tumor-microbe spatiotemporal interactions."

Recent Publications from IICD Researchers

CLADES — Contrastive Learning Augmented DifferEntial Splicing with Orthologous Positive Pairs. Talukder, A.; Keung, N.; Pe’er, I.; Knowles, D. A. bioRxiv 2026.

Evolution of Oncogene Amplification across 86,000 Cancer Cell Genomes. Lee, J. J.-K.; Salehi, S.; Myers, M. A.; Williams, M. J.; Yao, M. A.; Al-Rawi, D. H.; Lee, J.; Sun, E. G.; Thol, K.; Choi, S.; Havasov, E.; Preska Steinberg, A.; Wu, M.; Rusk, N.; Timmons, C.; Phua, C. Z. J.; Martis, S.; Mohibullah, N.; Manoj, P.; Redin, E.; Quintanal-Villalonga, Á.; Razavi, P.; Aparicio, S.; Rekhtman, N.; Tabar, V.; Awad, M. M.; Yu, H. A.; Yu, K. K. H.; Ventura, A.; McPherson, A.; Rudin, C. M.; Shah, S. P. bioRxiv 2026

Fundamental Mechanism of Ferroptosis: Three Unanswered Questions. Feinsod, H.; Stockwell, B. R. Ferroptosis Oxid Stress 2026, 2 (2). 

Homologous Recombination Deficiency and Hemizygosity Drive Resistance in Breast Cancer. Safonov, A.; Lee, M.; Brown, D. N.; Boscolo Bielo, L.; Mehine, M.; Bandlamudi, C.; O’Leary, B.; Shao, H.; Vicente, L.; Muldoon, D.; Zhu, A.; Ros, S.; Marra, A.; Selenica, P.; Bieche, I.; Wubbenhorst, B.; Ferraro, E.; Courtois, L.; El Botty, R.; Ahmed, M.; Moiso, E.; An, J. A.-R.; Donoghue, M. T. A.; Will, M.; Pareja, F.; Nizialek, E.; Lukashchuk, N.; Sofianopoulou, E.; Liu, Y.; Huang, X.; Chappey, C.; Staniszewska, A. D.; Ross, D.; Mandelker, D.; Ladanyi, M.; Schultz, N.; Berger, M. F.; Scaltriti, M.; Reis-Filho, J. S.; Li, B. T.; Offit, K.; Norton, L.; Shen, R.; Maxwell, K. N.; Couch, F.; Domchek, S. M.; Marangoni, E.; Shah, S.; Albertella, M. R.; Serra, V.; Weigelt, B.; Solit, D. B.; Nathanson, K. L.; Robson, M. E.; Turner, N. C.; Chandarlapaty, S.; Razavi, P. Nature 2026, in press.

Mapping Kinase-Dependent Tumor Immune Adaptation with Multiplexed Single-Cell CRISPR Screens. Shi, L.; Giglio, R. M.; Cai, Q.; Vaikunthan, M.; Hong, J.; Naqvi, A.; Milea, M.; Khanshali, H.; Schoonen, A.; Hou, N.; Guo, J.; Fraidenburg, M.; Shen, X.; Malinowski, S. W.; Ligon, K. L.; Rabadan, R.; Azizi, E.; McFaline-Figueroa, J. L. bioRxiv 2026.

Multimodal Spatial Alignment and Morphology Mapping with MOSAICField. Liu, X.; Zheng, H.; Halmos, P.; Gold, J.; Storrs, E.; Ding, L.; Raphael, B. J. bioRxiv 2026.

Perturbation-Guided Mapping of Colorectal Cancer Cell States to Causal Mechanisms. Hediyeh-zadeh, S.; Toh, T. S.; Dufva, O.; Serra, G.; Jackmola, R.; Fourneaux, C.; Pinto, G.; Fang, Z.; Picco, G.; Oliver, A. J.; Elmentaite, R.; Richter, T.; To, K.; Pett, J. P.; Teichmann, S. A.; Azizi, E.; Buettner, F.; Theis, F. J.; Garnett, M. J. bioRxiv 2026

POTTR: Identifying Recurrent Trajectories in Evolutionary and Developmental Processes Using Posets. Käufler, S. C.; Schmidt, H.; Jürgens, M.; Klau, G. W.; Sashittal, P.; Raphael, B. J. bioRxiv 2026

Scalable Contrastive Causal Discovery under Unknown Soft Interventions. Zhang, M.; Desai, K.; Kevlishvili, S.; Azizi, E. arXiv 2026.

In Case You Missed It

Stay up to date with the latest from our IICD community, and be sure to follow us on X, Bluesky, IG, LinkedIn, and YouTube! Below are some recent highlights you may have missed.

Instagram post about Sanja Vickovic
Job Opportunities

1. IICD Postdoctoral Research Scientist
2. Staff Associate III (IICD & Columbia SEAS Joint Position)
3. Associate Research Scientist (High-Throughput Perturbations)
4. PhD Opportunities at the
German Cancer Research Center

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