Veronika Kedlian

Biography

I completed my PhD with Sarah Teichmann at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge, where I applied single-cell and spatial genomics to systematically study human tissue ageing, focusing on human thymus and skeletal muscle. A central question driving my doctoral work was how changes in different cellular compartments of an ageing organ interact and compound to produce organ-level functional decline. In my skeletal muscle ageing work, I mapped age-associated changes across different cellular compartments of the muscle and their communication. I also co-led the construction of a spatial cell atlas of the human thymus, providing a coordinate system for studying how the thymic microenvironment remodels during the pre- to postnatal transition. Earlier, I studied inter-individual variability of gene expression in the ageing human brain during an internship with Janet Thornton at EMBL-EBI, and my interest in the biology of ageing was first sparked by undergraduate research on Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome at A*STAR Singapore. I hold BSc and MSc degrees in Biology from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine.

Research Interests

My research focuses on understanding how tissue function emerges from interactions between diverse cell types, and how these interactions break down during ageing and chronic disease. I work to combine large-scale single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data with dynamical modelling to move beyond static tissue descriptions toward mechanistic, causal models of tissue-level change. My current project is focused on trying to understand mechanisms of neuroinflammatory diseases with colleagues from Sanger Institute, University of Oxford, University of Exeter and Imperial College as a part of collaboration sponsored by OpenTargets. It aims to infer the coupled dynamics of multiple cell types in human tissues — disentangling contributions of local cell–cell interactions, tissue microenvironment, and systemic influences during ageing and disease progression.

Professional Career

Education

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