Haerin is a second year Ph.D. student interested in understanding patient heterogeneity and drug response in immune-mediated diseases using single cell transcriptomic data. 

The broad spectrum of clinical manifestations and disease trajectories in immune-mediated diseases have hampered efforts for understanding aetiology and developing targeted drugs. Although recent studies have attempted patient stratification using various clinical features, serum cytokine levels, and genetic variants, the efficacy of these methods was limited. Haerin’s thesis aims to explain phenotypic heterogeneity and drug response in immune-mediated diseases using transcriptomic profiling at the single-cell level. By adopting this approach, she aims to further discover molecular processes occurring within and between immune cells and improve our understanding of disease pathology. She is co-supervised by Emma Davenport and Muzlifah Haniffa of Wellcome Sanger Institute.