Wendy Dong

Program: Computational and Systems Biology

Current advisor: Jeffrey Milbrandt, MD, PhD

Undergraduate university: Duke University, 2021

Enrollment year: 2021

Research summary
Deciphering Peripheral Nerve Microenvironment and Isoform Dynamics in Health and Disease

I am in the lab of Dr. Jeff Milbrandt, co-mentored by Dr. Sheng Chih (Peter) Jin. My research project focuses on understanding the different vulnerabilities of sensory vs. motor nerves in relationship to other cellular components of the peripheral nerves. These cells include glial cells, fibroblasts, vascular cells, and immune cells. The experiments will focus on how abnormalities in these surrounding cells disrupt axon maintenance and lead to varying resilience between sensory and motor nerves. I will use a multi-omics approach, performing and analyzing in an integrated manner of single-nuclei RNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics. I am also interested in isoform dynamics in the peripheral nervous system and will use long-read RNA-sequencing to elucidate isoform remodeling in a nerve crush injury model.

Graduate publications
Choi J, Strickland A, Loo HQ, Dong W, Barbar L, Bloom AJ, Sasaki Y, Jin SC, DiAntonio A, Milbrandt. 2025 Diverse cell types establish a pathogenic immune environment in peripheral neuropathy. J Neuroinflammation, 22(1):138. PMCID: PMC12100903

Ali LM, Yim AKY, Gerbi E, Nguyen T, Tu N, Ikede F, Sampaleanu R, Grigore D, Waligorski J, Kremitzki C, Yuan L, Dong W, Mitra R, Milbrandt J, Buchser W. 2025 Biophysical simulation enables segmentation and nervous system atlas mapping for image first spatial omics. NPJ Syst Biol Appl, 12(1):3. PMCID: PMC12770445