Dr. Rajasree Menon has more than 20 years of experience in computational biology research. Her current research work focuses on studying cell states with unique biological functions that are associated with kidney disease progression. Towards this, her work integrates multimodal data including clinical variables, pathology descriptors, spatial and single cell/nucleus transcriptomics.

Prior to joining the MiKTMC, Dr. Menon’s research focused on studying splice isoforms in human cancers, specifically ERBB2+ breast cancers. Using a novel three-frame translated protein database and publicly available protein datasets, she was able to identify novel and known splice isoforms that were enriched in cell motility and translation initiation functions in ERBB2+ breast cancers. Dr. Menon is now working on understanding the isoform expression in kidney at single-cell level, comparing normal tissue with disease kidney biopsies.

Dr. Menon leads the MiKTMC single cell analysis core and collaborate with other University of Michigan and global researchers to define kidney cells and cell states using single cell profiling approaches.