GESTALT’s community-driven governance structure consists of the General Assembly, the Steering Committee, the Executive Committee, and multiple Working Groups (WGs). The General Assembly, comprising all members, is the highest decision-making body, ensuring that the voices of the entire community are represented in strategic decisions. Learn more about GESTALT governance
The Steering Committee, formed by senior GESTALT members and coordinators from each WG, implements decisions from the General Assembly and oversees day-to-day operations. WGs are at the core of GESTALT’s activities, focusing on specific technologies or application domains within spatial-omics. They are dynamic, self-driven teams that tackle both short-term and long-term challenges.
WGs develop best practices, validate protocols, and foster collaborations, ensuring that the latest methodologies are accessible to the community. For example, the Standardisation WG creates and validates protocols, while the Data Analysis WG provides tools and training for complex spatial-omics data processing. Other groups focus on NGS and imaging-based transcriptomics, antibody-based assays, and developing new technologies, highlighting GESTALT’s commitment to advancing the field through collaborative innovation.
Steering Committee
Associate Professor Luciano Martelotto has recently been appointed Head of the Development Laboratory of the Adelaide Centre for Epigenetics (ACE), South Australia ImmunoGENomics Cancer Institute (SAIGENCI). Prior to joining ACE/SAIGENCI, he was the Scientific Director of the Single Cell Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, Department of Systems Biology, Harvard University (USA). During his role at the Single Cell Lab at HMS he led a team of technology specialist in charge of developing, implementing, and offering methods of single-cell profiling to build a bridge between researchers and single-cell technologies in their quest to understand how cells collectively perform systems-level functions in healthy and diseased states.
He is also a Technology Advisor for multiple companies including Omniscope, ArgenTAG and South Australian Genomics Centre.
Luciano has a robust interdisciplinary scientific background, specialising in molecular biology and biochemistry with a strong background in technology and engineering. He is originally a cell and molecular biologist with a degree in Biotechnology, a PhD in Biological Sciences and Post-doctoral training in cancer genomics and single cell sequencing technologies. His diverse scientific background stems from working in a wide range of fields – plants genetics, microbiology, cancer biology and genomics – and has shaped my ambition and capacity to learn, create, develop, and apply technologies that cross multiple disciplines. The common thread woven throughout his career path has been the focus on converging ideas from various sciences and taking this ideology to develop or refine approaches to address challenges in real life settings and ultimately contribute to improving lives through technological advancements
Website Link: https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/luciano.martelotto
Ioannis Vlachos, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School (HMS), and the Director of the Spatial Technologies Unit of the HMS Initiative for RNA Medicine. He also directs the Bioinformatics Unit of the Precision RNA Medicine Core. Ioannis is the co-Director of the Bioinformatics Program of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI), a Member of the Dana Farber / Harvard Cancer Center, and an Associate Faculty of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard.
Dr. Vlachos’ research focuses on the optimal use of cutting-edge technologies for reverse translation, including bulk, single cell, and spatial tissue profiling to inform clinical decision making.
To enable the community gain access and benefit from the spatial tissue profiling revolution, he established the Spatial Technologies Unit(www.spatialtechnology.org) , with support from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the HMS Initiative for RNA Medicine. It is a center of excellence for spatial tissue profiling, providing access to technology, education, and support for entrepreneurship.
Dr. Vlachos work is supported by funding from diverse sources, including NIH (R01, P01, U54), the DoD, foundations, and collaborations with the industry. He is co-PI of a Human Biomolecular Atlas Project (HuBMAP, hubmap.org) Tissue Mapping Center, where his team is using cutting-edge single cell and spatial tissue profiling to interrogate the role of human lymphatic vasculature in health and disease.
Dr. Vlachos Website: https://spatialtechnology.org/
Jasmine Plummer received a master’s degree in neuroscience from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and a PhD in molecular genetics from the University of Toronto. She then studied as a postdoctoral fellow at the Saban Research Institute at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. . Before joining St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as an Associate Member of the Department of Developmental Neurobiology, Dr. Plummer was an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences as well as Co-Director of the PhD Genomics Core and Associate Director of the Applied Genomics, Computational and Translational Core at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Dr. Plummer is also the Director of the Center for Spatial Omics at St. Jude. Her research focuses on using a multi-omics approach to examine genetic risk as a factor of oncogenesis.
Dr. Plummer has received several awards including the OSOTF James Crothers Peripheral Nerve Damage Fellowship Award, the Zilkha Neurogenetics Institute Young Scholars Award, the Autism Speaks Meixner Post-Doctoral Fellow Award, T.E.A.L Foundation Award and the Tina’s Wish award.
Dr. Plummer Website: https://www.stjude.org/research/labs/plummer-lab/plummer-lab-team.html
Dr. Rong Fan is the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University and Professor of Pathology at Yale School of Medicine. He received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, completed his postdoctoral training at California Institute of Technology, and then joined the faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University in 2010. His latest contributions to science and engineering include the development of microfabricated devices for single-cell and spatial omics and the application to human cancer research, immunology, and immuno oncology. He developed a microdevice for simultaneous measurement of 42 immune effector proteins in single cells at high throughput, which remains the highest multiplexing to date for a single-cell protein secretion assay. This microdevice, called IsoCode, and the automation system, called IsoLight and IsoSpark, have been commercialized by IsoPlexis (NASDAQ: ISO) and used by more than 100 cancer centers and pharmaceutical companies including all top 15 major pharma in the world for evaluating cancer immunotherapies. His latest contribution to single-cell omics is the development of a first-of-its-kind technology for spatially resolved multi-omics sequencing of tissues at genome scale and cellular level. It demonstrated for the first time the mapping of whole transcriptome and hundreds of proteins pixel by pixel in a tissue section. He also developed spatial epigenome sequencing, which adds a new dimension to the emerging field of spatial omics. He is co-founder and scientific advisor of IsoPlexis, Singleron Biotechnologies, and AtlasXomics. He was on the SAB of Bio-Techne (NASDAQ: TECH) and chaired the Advisory Board of BioPath, a program launched to promote public science advocacy, education, and biotech workforce development in the Greater New Haven Area. He is the recipient of multiple awards including the NCI Howard Temin Career Transition Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He has been elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE), and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
Dr. Fang Website: https://www.fan-lab.org/
Dr. Coskun is a Bernie-Marcus Early-Career Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. Dr. Coskun is a systems biotechnologist and bioengineer, working at the nexus of multiplexed cell imaging and quantitative tissue biology. Dr. Coskun directs an interdisciplinary research team at the Single Cell Biotechnology and Spatial Omics Laboratory, an interdisciplinary program strategically positioned for multiparameter imaging one cell at a time by spatial context and function. Dr. Coskun holds 5 issued patents and is also the co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in major scientific journals. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award 2024, NIH R35 MIRA Award 2023, BMES-CMBE Rising Star Award 2023, American Lung Association Innovation Award 2022, and Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 CIOS Award, among other research and teaching awards. Previously, Dr. Coskun was an Instructor at Stanford University. Dr. Coskun received his postdoctoral training from the California Institute of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.His research has been supported by Federal and Private grants, including the National Institutes of Health (NIA, NIAID, NCI, NIDCR, OD, and ORIP), Wellcome LEAP, Burroughs Wellcome Fund (CASI), NSF CMaT, American Cancer Society IRG, Multi-cellular engineered living systems (M-CELS), and Regenerative Medicine Center. In addition, he leads outreach programs to engage K12 students and undergraduate students through BioCrowd Studio, an innovative crowd-sourcing program bringing together interactive virtual media, distributed biokits, and collaborative spatial discovery.
Dr. Ahmet Coskun Website: https://bme.gatech.edu/bme/faculty/Ahmet-F-Coskun
Katy Börner is the Victor H. Yngve Professor of Engineering & Information Science in the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering & Information and Library Science, School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, and Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN and Visiting Professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in The Netherlands.
She is a curator of the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit. She holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology in Leipzig, 1991 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, 1997.
She became an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2012.
Dr. Börner Website: https://cns-iu.github.io/katy/
Ruben Dries, PhD combines computational data analysis with novel experimental approaches and technologies to understand basic biological concepts in health and disease. These insights could then be leveraged to target tumor specific processes or inhibit the development of treatment resistance. These interests grew dynamically throughout his research career. In his early studies Dr. Dries developed a systems biology approach to dissect the regulatory network of neural differentiating embryonic stem cells and used this knowledge at a later stage to understand how cancer cells transcriptionally respond to targeted therapies and other stress factors. More recently, he expanded this area by focusing on how cells can spatially communicate within their microenvironment and build tools to facilitate these type of analyses.
Dr. Dries Website: https://www.drieslab.com/
Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast
Working Groups
Standards WG
Non-Model Organisms WG
Imaging-Based Spatial Transcriptomivs
Clinical Spatial Tissue Profilng Working Group