Tallulah Andrews

Dr. Tallulah Andrews is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario. She leads the Andrews Computational Biology Lab, focusing on the integration of biological imaging and multiple -omics technologies to understand the structure of diseased tissues. Her laboratory develops computational tools and pipelines required to analyze and interpret data generated by single-cell and spatial transcriptomics technologies.

Dr. Andrews earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, UK, where she used systems biology approaches to identify biological pathways underlying rare genetic diseases. She completed post-doctoral training at University Health Network Research in Toronto and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK. She is a long-term member of the Human Cell Atlas initiative.

Her research focuses on developing computational approaches for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data analysis. Key areas include:

• Developing methods to distinguish differences between single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing
• Creating tools for ambient RNA removal to improve data quality
• Inferring cell-cell interactions from high-throughput data
• Developing machine learning tools for joint analysis of molecular and imaging data

Dr. Andrews' lab has active collaborations on several disease applications including Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis, Biliary Atresia, Atherosclerosis, Soft Tissue Sarcoma, and Alzheimer's disease. Her work bridges computational biology with clinical applications to better understand disease mechanisms.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on methodological development for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data analysis. She has contributed significantly to the field through both tool development (EmptyDrops, M3Drop) and comprehensive tutorials that guide researchers in proper computational analysis of these complex datasets.

She currently mentors several students:

• Boris Tchatchoua Ngassam (PhD student in Machine Learning)
• Sunny Pang (MSc Biochemistry)
• Siraj Elzagallaai (MSc Bioinformatics)
• Jack Peplinski (4th year Software Engineering/Business)
• Bryan Lung (4th year HSP Medical Cell Biology)

Her laboratory maintains active collaborations with several research groups including the MacParland Lab at UHN, the Taylor group at Northwestern University, the Boffa group at the Robarts Research Institute, and the Prado group at the Robarts Research Institute.