Na Sun

My lab focuses on using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand complex biological problems. We’re especially interested in how cells organize themselves inside tissues and how that organization changes in disease. In conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, for example, immune cells called microglia react to abnormal protein buildup in the brain and shift into new “neighborhoods.”

Over the past year, we’ve developed a machine learning model that compares healthy and diseased tissues, almost like a “spot-the-difference” puzzle, to find small groups of cells that are behaving differently in disease. Although we began this work with Alzheimer’s disease, this approach can be applied to many other conditions, including cancers.