Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Keara Lane, NU Molecular Biosciences "Single-cell decision making during bacterial infection"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details

Speaker:
Keara Lane - Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
Title:
Single-cell decision making during bacterial infection: lessons from innate immunity
Abstract:
Bacterial infections are dynamic and heterogeneous, yet we have primarily relied on population-level snapshots to understand them. For this seminar, I will primarily talk about my postdoctoral research which focused on understanding the role of cell-to-cell variation in innate immune signaling dynamics during bacterial infection. First, I will discuss work linking NF-κB dynamics to single-cell gene expression patterns and second, how signaling dynamics are used by macrophages to transmit information about the threat associated with a given bacterial stimulus. I will wrap up with an outline of the current focus of the Lane lab, namely cell-cell communication dynamics during host-pathogen interaction.
Speaker Bio:
Keara Lane is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern. Keara completed her PhD with Tyler Jacks at MIT followed by postdoctoral research in systems biology with Markus Covert at Stanford. Her lab explores the time dimension, or dynamics, of bacterial infection in individual cells. The Lane lab takes an interdisciplinary approach, integrating live-cell microscopy with global single-cell profiling technologies to make quantitative, dynamic, single-cell measurements during bacterial infection. The goal of the lab is to determine how decisions made in individual host and bacterial cells influence infection outcome, with a view to identifying novel strategies to engineer cellular behavior to control infection outcome.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO Fall Seminar Series returns on Sept 24th!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
//
Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details

The Wednesdays @ NICO Fall Seminar Series returns on September 24th and will run through November 12th, 2025. Please visit our web site in early September for detailed speaker information, talk titles and abstracts.
This fall, we are honored to host the following distinguished speakers:
9/24 - Emma Alexander, Dept of Computer Science, Northwestern University
10/1 - Sebastien Martin, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
10/8 - Tomer Ullman, Dept of Psychology, Harvard University
10/15 - Patrick Park, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
10/22 - Max Kreminski, Midjourney
10/29 - Elizabeth Gerber, Mechanical Engineering and Communication Studies, Northwestern University
11/5 - Julio Ottino, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University
11/12 - Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Google Research
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: TBA via Zoom
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, September 24, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)