Dr. Romain Lopez

Biography

Romain Lopez serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at New York University. His research focuses on developing probabilistic machine learning methods to uncover the biological mechanisms that govern cellular behavior in disease. Lopez has made significant contributions through his work on Deep Generative Models (DGMs) which provide insights into complex biological systems. He co-developed the widely adopted scVI-tools for modeling cellular heterogeneity and has pioneered probabilistic approaches to single-cell analysis. His academic journey includes a postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech, hosted by Jonathan Pritchard and Aviv Regev. Lopez earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with Mike Jordan and Nir Yosef, and holds an MSc in Applied Mathematics from École polytechnique in France. His interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and scientific discovery, aiming to enhance hypothesis testing pipelines, particularly in causality and interpretability. He is also active in analyzing spatial organization within tissues, as evidenced by his work on microenvironments in cancer. Excited about the potential of machine learning, Lopez is dedicated to unlocking new ways of understanding biology and transforming medicine.

Research Interests