Rate My Professor Jessica Mar

Professor Jessica Mar is a Professor at the University of Queensland, where she serves as Group Leader of the Mar Group at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN). Affiliated with the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences and the Genome Innovation Hub, she earned her Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University. Her research specializes in developing bioinformatics methods to elucidate how regulatory processes malfunction in human diseases. The Mar Group models the variability of gene expression in transcriptome regulation, with a particular emphasis on single-cell biology. They create accurate statistical approaches for single-cell sequencing data to reveal cellular heterogeneity, new subtypes, and stochasticity in key pathways or master regulators. Leveraging big data from advanced sequencing technologies, the group applies Bayesian methodologies and machine learning algorithms in computational biology, focusing on stem cell ageing and regenerative engineering.

Professor Mar's career includes roles as ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor at AIBN. She has supervised multiple Doctor of Philosophy students, completing theses on topics such as transcriptomic heterogeneity in ageing and organoids, refining single-cell data analysis for rare cell populations, and statistical methods for cellular heterogeneity in multi-omics data. Her funding achievements encompass an ARC Future Fellowship from 2018 to 2023 for developing bioinformatics methods for single-cell transcriptomics, a Georgina Sweet Award from 2020 to 2023 investigating heterogeneity in disease transcriptomes, NHMRC IDEAS Grants for brain organoid models of hypoxia, and the 2017 Metcalf Prize of $50,000 from the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia. Key publications include 'Self-renewal of a purified Tie2+ hematopoietic stem cell population relies on mitochondrial clearance' in Science (2016), 'Variability of gene expression identifies transcriptional regulators of early human embryonic development' in PLoS Genetics (2015, corresponding author), 'Divergent reprogramming routes lead to alternative stem-cell states' in Nature (2014), 'Senolytic therapy alleviates physiological human brain aging and COVID-19 neuropathology' in Nature Aging (2023), and 'scShapes: a statistical framework for identifying distribution shapes in single-cell RNA-sequencing data' in GigaScience (2023). Her work significantly impacts quantitative biomedical science and stem cell research.