Biography
Dr Mai Chan Lau earned her PhD from the National University of Singapore in 2015, focusing on high-performance GPU research. During her postdoctoral work at Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN, A*STAR), she made significant contributions to important immune studies, leveraging her expertise in single-cell bioinformatics. This experience sparked her interest in exploring new aspects of tumor-immune heterogeneity in the tumor microenvironment (TME). Motivated by the potential clinical impact of addressing these questions, Mai Chan joined Prof. Shuji Ogino's laboratory at Harvard Medical School in the United States in 2018. There, she delved into studying tumor-immune interactions in the tissue space through the analysis of histological H&E and multiplexed immunofluorescence images. Her novel spatial analysis method, “Tumor-Immune Partitioning and Clustering (TIPC)”, earned her the Poster of Distinction at the 2019 Harvard Medical School Pathology Retreat. It also resulted in a provisional patent coversheet. In 2021, she returned to Singapore and joined Dr. Joe Yeong's laboratory at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB, A*STAR). There, she expanded her research to include spatial transcriptomics in the field of spatial immunology.
In 2022, Mai Chan was jointly recruited to oversee the Computational Immunology Platform at SIgN and the "Spatial & Single-cell Omics Immunology" group at BII (Bioinformatics Institute, A*STAR).
Mai Chan's contributions to AI-based biomedical research have gained recognition both locally and internationally. She has served as a program committee member for Clinical Translation of Medical Image Computing & Computer-Assisted Intervention in consecutive years, 2022 and 2023. Additionally, she holds an editorial board position for the World Scientific Annual Review of Cancer Immunology journal.