Cole Trapnell PhD

Dr. Trapnell studies stem cells and differentiation, primarily using high throughput transcriptome sequencing. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was jointly advised by Steven Salzberg and Lior Pachter. As a postdoc in John Rinn’s lab at Harvard’s Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology department, he pioneered methods for analyzing differentiation with single cell transcriptome sequencing. He is the principal developer of several widely used open-source software tools for analyzing high-throughput sequencing experiments. At the University of Washington, his lab will focus on finding genes that govern stem cell maintenance and cell differentiation, primarily through single-cell genomics. The lab will operate at the interface between genomics and experimental cell biology to answer how cells make fate decisions.