Quantification of single-cell differentiation timescales from diverse mammalian

I studied biology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (2014-2019). For my master thesis, I joined the group of Fabian Theis at the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB), Helmholtz Center Munich, to study pancreatic beta cell heterogeneity using single cell transcriptomic data. In December 2019, started my PhD at ICB in the group of Dr. Carsten Marr.
During my PhD, I will study differentiation timescales from diverse mammalian species at single-cell resolution:
All multicellular organisms exhibit a characteristic life cycle that unfolds by development from immature forms into adults that procreate and age. The timescales of life cycle and its stages is usually fixed for any given species, but can vary considerably within a class. How these timescale differences, especially those of early cell differentiation, arise at the cellular level is the focus of my project.
Through close collaboration with our experimental partners, we differentiate stem cells of various mammalian species with diverse developmental timescales to neural progenitor cells. Along this differentiation process, we apply timelapse single-cell transcriptome and epigenome sequencing to quantify gene expression changes and chromatin accessibility over time, ultimately comparing the species-specific differentiation processes of different mammals in a quantitative fashion.