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I’m very excited to be joining MIT Biological Engineering @MITdeptofBE as an Assistant Professor and the Ragon Institute @ragoninstitute as a member in January 2026! I will be recruiting students and postdocs (see more info below).
Eric Sun
81 posts
Eric Sun
@EricDSun
Machine learning for aging, spatial/single-cell omics, immunology ||
Assistant Professor @MIT | PhD @Stanford
Stanford, CA
Joined October 2021
- Our multi-year project with @BrunetLab @james_y_zou on building "spatial aging clocks" from spatially resolved single-cell transcriptomics across lifespan and using these clocks to examine spatial effects on brain aging is out now in @Nature ! Paper:
- Replying to @EricDSunFor interested postdocs and students (grad & undergrad), please reach out to me at [email protected]!
- Replying to @EricDSunOf course more work is needed to determine how much each of these mediators contributes to these proximity effects and whether T cells or NSCs can be targeted to improve brain function.
- Replying to @EricDSunMy lab will build AI/ML tools and computational methods to model the biology of aging & rejuvenation with a particular focus on spatial and single-cell omics and immune cell interactions.
- Replying to @EricDSunI would like to extend a big thank you to my amazing co-advisers @james_y_zou & @BrunetLab and to my many fantastic mentors, colleagues, and collaborators!
- Replying to @EricDSun"Aging clocks" are machine learning models trained to predict age and have been shown to track biological aging across a lot (but not all!) relevant conditions. Could we build clocks that track aging at spatial and single-cell resolution?
- ImageNet-trained deep neural networks exhibit illusion-like response to the Scintillating grid | JOV | ARVO Journals jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?a…
- Replying to @EricDSunA big thank you to Anne Brunet (@BrunetLab) and James Zou (@james_y_zou) for their fantastic mentorship and to all co-authors for their valuable contributions -- this work would not have been possible without them!!!
- Replying to @EricDSunAnd we identified lipid metabolism (in nearby cells) and exosomes/growth factors (in NSCs) as potential mediators for the NSC pro-rejuvenating effect.
- Replying to @EricDSunExcitingly, some interventions like exercise can modulate the cell proximity effects in a rejuvenating directions (for example reducing the T cell pro-aging effect)!
- Replying to @james_y_zou @MITdeptofBE and @BrunetLabThanks so much James, appreciate all your support!
- Replying to @EricDSunSummarizing these effects, we found that T cells had the most pro-aging proximity effect and neural stem cells (NSCs) had the most pro-rejuvenating proximity effect on average.
