Bence Kover
Academic and Work Experience Prior to Sept 2023 Programme Start
I have completed my integrated Master’s (Msci) degree at University College London, and also spent a year abroad at the California Institute of Technology. During my studies I have gained insights into both wet-lab work and computational analysis. In my Master’s project, I have discovered various genetic and environmental perturbations that can trigger multicellularity in the otherwise single-celled fission yeast.
PhD Programme- Year 1- MRes and Project Rotations
During the first year (MRes) of the ATRM programme, I have completed three rotation projects.
In my first rotation at the Spagnoli lab, I worked on integrating single-cell transcriptomic data from human embryonic pancreas samples. This was in the wider context of trying to understand developmental pathways as well as communication between cell types.
In my second rotation at the Andoniadou lab, I was working on understanding the precise molecular details of transcription factor networks in the pituitary gland, using single-nucleus multiome (paired RNA and chromatin accessibility measurements) data. This project revealed insights into the core regulatory circuit of pituitary stem cells, and will form the basis of one of my PhD aims. In addition, I had the chance to contribute to the revisions of a publication (Santambrogio et al., 2024: Nat Comms) on discovering a novel stem cell population in the adrenal medulla.
In my third rotation with Alessandra Vigilante, I developed a novel framework called Pseudovisium for faster and more memory-efficient processing of high-resolution spatial transcriptomic data. Briefly, Pseudovisium bins transcripts into hexagons and transforms the outputs of various spatial platforms into a shared format, mimicking that of 10X Visium. This not only democratises analysis (in terms of speed and memory-usage) but also makes all datasets compatible with tools written specifically for 10X Visium data. In addition, Pseudovisium facilitates generating valuable QC reports across datasets, as well as merging datasets that were acquired with different technologies. The manuscript is currently under peer-review, and pre-printed at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.23.604776v1 .
PhD Programme- Years 2 to 4 - Doctoral Studies
For my PhD project, I will work on the pituitary gland in the lab of Prof Cynthia Andoniadou. I will use various cutting-edge computational and experimental techniques for systems-level modelling of pituitary cell fate decisions in vivo. We anticipate that this project will revise our understanding of cell types in the pituitary gland, how they are related, and how they might influence each other.
