Hemali Phatnani, PhD
Core Faculty Member, Director, Center for Genomics of Neurodegenerative Disease, NYGC Assistant Professor of Neurological Sciences (in Neurology), Columbia University
Neurodegenerative Disease - 2021 NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award
Hemali Phatnani, PhD, is Core Faculty Member and Director of the Center for Genomics of Neurodegenerative Disease (CGND) at the New York Genome Center (NYGC). Dr. Phatnani has a joint appointment as Assistant Professor of Neurology at Columbia University Medical Center.
Dr. Phatnani’s research program spans both institutions and has three main goals: 1) To serve as the hub of collaborative interactions between clinicians, computational biologists, and basic scientists; 2) To build and disseminate tools and resources for the neurodegenerative disease research community; and 3) To understand the role of intercellular interactions in age-related decline and in neurodegenerative disease. Her lab takes a multidisciplinary approach to this question by integrating antemortem and postmortem phenotyping data with multimodal genomics approaches that span multiple scales, from the single-cell to tissue-level. Her lab’s goal is to understand the molecular phenotypes associated with dysfunction in diverse cell types within tissues, and how these molecular signatures change over the course of aging and disease. Her work has focused primarily on the spectrum of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Frontotemporal Dementia (ALS-FTD), and they are now developing ways to apply their methods to Alzheimer, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s Diseases.
The lab uses novel tools and technologies in conjunction with cellular and animal models and patient-derived tissue samples to understand how disease-causing mutations perturb the interplay between glial and neuronal cells in ALS-FTD. To understand the role of intercellular interactions in disease, they apply spatially resolved transcriptomic and proteomic approaches to deconvolve both spatial and cell-type specific changes in gene expression across entire brain or spinal cord regions from rodent and human post-mortem tissue. They develop novel computational and analytical tools tailored to overcoming the unique analytical challenges associated with such complex data sets. They have also developed image acquisition and analytical tools to study finer details in the CNS. Using such an integrated, cell ensemble-resolution, multi-omic approach, their studies have generated a rich resource of multidimensional datasets that enable us to determine cell- and region-specific molecular correlates of functional impairment in ALS-FTD. They will also provide a platform for other investigators to unveil markers specific to their disease of study. This is encouraged and facilitated by sharing their platform and data with the broad scientific community.
Prior ExperienceDr. Phatnani received her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Duke University, where she characterized the interactions between RNA polymerase and proteins involved in the mechanistic coupling of RNA transcription and processing. She earned a BSc degree in Life Sciences from Bombay University. To learn more about Dr. Phatnani’s research, visit her lab page.
