Adipose tissue secretes cytokines to regulate essential functions, but comprehensive study is prevented by difficult-to-access depots such as visceral epicardial adipose tissue and differences between donor sources and methods to generate cell lines. This project will start with an isogenic population of cultured human preadipocytes and reprogram them to specific types of adipocytes using a combinatorial process analogous to that of induced pluripotent stem cells. This project includes working with single cell (sc)-RNAseq and sc-ATACseq datasets using XGBoost and other models.

Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) complications cause morbidity and mortality, but occur heterogeneously among those at risk and thus are difficult to predict. Previous studies to identify individuals at risk of diabetic complications focus on single timepoint data for a few features and do not examine phenotypic variables over time. This project will analyze multiple longitudinal clinical phenotypes to identify clusters of individuals at risk of diabetic complications.