The aim of the statistical bioinformatics seminar is to provide a forum for people working within the broad area of computation and statistics and their application to various aspects of biology to present their work and showcase their ongoing projects. It is intended to foster the exchange of ideas and build potential collaborations across multiple disciplines. The format of the talk is approximately 45 minutes plus questions. Monday November 19, 2018 The seminars are held at 1:00 pm on Mondays at the Charles Perkins Centre, Seminar Room (Level 3, large meeting room). Speaker: A/Prof Jessica Mar (The University of Queensland) Title: One of these cells is not like the other - how variability of gene expression highlights regulatory control. Abstract: When studying the transcriptome, our inferences typically revolve around changes in average gene expression. For a population of single cells, modeling gene expression distributions and how their properties differ between phenotypes, can be far more informative than following average trends alone. This talk outlines some of the approaches my lab has developed to investigate how variability of gene expression contributes to our understanding of transcriptional regulation. About the speaker: Associate Professor Jessica Mar is a Group Leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. The Mar group focuses on understanding variability in the transcriptome and how this informs regulation of cell phenotypes. Jess received her PhD in Biostatistics from Harvard University in 2008. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston (2008-11), and an Assistant Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York (2011-2018). Having only just relocated back to Australia as an ARC Future Fellow this year in July, a major focus of her work is on modelling the aging process using single cell bioinformatics. Jess has received several awards, including a Fulbright scholarship (2003), the Metcalf Prize for Stem Cell Research from the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia (2017), and the one that she is the proudest of is the LaDonne H. Shulman Award for Teaching Excellence (2017) because the winner is selected by the graduate students at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.