On December 8, 2025, Carolyn Glass, MD, PhD, associate professor of Pathology, co-director of the Division of AI and Computational Pathology, and Jichun Xie, PhD, associate professor of Mathematics and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics who holds a secondary appointment in the Division of AI and Computational Pathology, each gave presentations at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) SenNet Multi-omics and Computational Lecture Series. Their work exemplifies how interdisciplinary expertise and collaboration at Duke accelerate science.
Glass delivered a talk titled “The Role of Pulmonary Senescence in Early Lung Cancer Development Using Multi-omic Approaches,” in which she highlighted innovative computational models designed to understand early lung cancer better. She also discussed how these algorithms could be applied in clinical trials to improve patient care.
Xie’s talk, “xVERSE: A Transcriptomics-Native Foundation Model for Universal Cell Representation and Generation,” highlighted her pioneering work using novel AI models to solve fundamental challenges in senescence studies. Xie is a key investigator in the Data Analysis Core, focusing on developing novel AI methods to characterize senescent cells and further quantify the cellular trajectories under drug perturbation.
The NIH Common Fund’s Cellular Senescence Network (SenNet) Program was created to build a comprehensive understanding of senescent cells, a rare non-dividing type, that can influence human biology in both beneficial and harmful ways. The program aims to map and characterize these cells across the full human lifespan, providing critical insights into how they contribute to health, aging, and disease.
A key objective of SenNet is to drive the development of innovative tools and technologies that build upon previous advances in single cell analysis, such as those from the Common Fund’s Human Biomolecular Atlas Program and Single Cell Analysis Program.
Duke University School of Medicine is recognized as an academic leader in developing and applying machine learning algorithms to human translational science. In 2021, Duke University Medical received major funding from the NIH and National Institute of Aging to establish one of the first Human Tissue Mapping Centers. The initiative aims to improve the characterization of cellular senescence in normal multi-organ tissues.
As part of this effort, Glass received a five-year grant of over $3 million, to lead the Pathology Core, focusing on characterizing senescent cells in the normal aging human lung. The U54 Grant Award involved multiple principal investigators including Faculty in the Dept of Medicine Andrew Nixon, PhD.
Previous senescence work from Glass and Xie’s labs have contributed significantly to work published in high-impact journals including Nature Aging, Nature Genetics, and Cell Genomics.