Elias Farr

Biography

My fascination with biology started when I learned that life is organized by a code that exists in the form of up to meter-long molecules in every cell of an organism. This fascination drove me to study Molecular Biotechnology in Heidelberg, a multidisciplinary course that taught me how to hold a pipette, code, and what systems biology is. My first deeper involvement in research was my bachelor's thesis in the Lab of Freddy Frischknecht in Heidelberg, where we engineered the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, to understand its lifecycle better. For my master's thesis, I then joined the lab of Julio Saez-Rodriguez, where I learned about cell-cell communication inference, specifically of metabolites. From that moment on, I was captivated by the question of how tissues form and organize. An opportunity to pursue this interest was a PhD in the group of Muzlifah Haniffa, who studies human development, skin, and immunology using patient samples as well as organoid systems. In the Saez Lab, we complement this approach by developing and applying computational tools to study spatial organisation and cell-cell communication.

Research Interests

My work focuses on how cell-cell communication drives early organ development. Our model system is the human hair follicle, a mini-organ that, like many other organs, forms prenatally from reciprocal interactions of an epithelial and a mesenchymal cell layer. We study this organogenesis using spatial transcriptomics and multiomics (nuclear single-cell RNA and ATAC from the same cell). Long-term, I am interested in developing new approaches to study cell-cell communication and developing in vitro systems that recapitulate in vitro development, as well as allow better training of computational models to infer cell-cell communication.

Professional Career

Education

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