Affiliation: Department of Computational Biology of Spatial Biomedical Systems Würzburg Institute of Systems Immunology, Würzburg, Germany

Dr. Ankit Agrawal obtained his Ph.D. in Computational Biology from HBNI, Mumbai, India, in 2019. During his doctoral research, he developed biophysical models of chromatin architecture, spanning scales from motifs to individual chromosomes. Dr. Agrawal conducted a brief postdoc in the developmental biology laboratory of Elazar Zelzer at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, from 2018-2020, where he developed a computational pipeline to define cell state based on morphological features. This led to the discovery that morphological cell states delineate principal axes in bone tissue variability. His research demonstrated that spatiotemporal clusters of these morphological cell states are responsible for different bone growth strategies in adult and embryonic mice. Since 2021, Dr. Agrawal has been working in the lab of Dominic Grün, where he developed NiCo, a computational tool for identifying cell state covariation in the colocalized neighborhood by integrating spatial transcriptomics and single-cell RNA sequencing data. Dr. Agrawal's research interest focuses on understanding cellular states and cell state transitions in healthy and diseased tissues.