Jesse Gillis

My laboratory studies the cellular organization of the nervous system through analysis of gene expression. The central problem we address is how transcriptomic data can be used to define neuronal cell types rigorously and, more fundamentally, how to determine when a measured biological signal is reproducible rather than an artifact of a particular dataset or method. This concern with replicability is the distinguishing character of the work. We develop statistical methods that quantify whether cell types, gene functions, and co-expression relationships recur across independent experiments, and that clarify what such recurrence does and does not imply. Applied to the brain, these methods have helped characterize how cortical neurons acquire their identities, how conserved co-expression programs distinguish cell types across mouse, primate, and human, and how faithfully organoids and other models reproduce primary tissue. The laboratory contributes to international efforts to build reference atlases of the mammalian and human brain, and extends the same analytical framework to development and other tissues. This breadth reflects a single premise: that the reproducibility of a signal is itself a measurable, biologically informative quantity. Trainees join a group working at the intersection of neuroscience, genomics, and statistics, with projects ranging from method development to the analysis of large single-cell datasets. Current directions include reference-quality atlases of human brain development and new measures of neuronal maturation and spatial organization.

Faculty Appointments

Department of Physiology
Department of Molecular Genetics
Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research