Aidan and Matt present at the Penn CURF Research Expo

Congratulations to Qian Lab undergraduates Aidan Gor and Matt Greenspun, who presented their summer research at the Penn CURF Research Expo!

Aidan presented his work on spatial transcriptomic analysis of focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) and its implications for autism spectrum disorder, using MERFISH to investigate cortical laminar organization, pathological cell states, and autism-associated gene expression in human FCD tissue. His summer research was supported by a 2026 Autism Science Foundation Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship .

Matt presented his work developing a convolutional neural network to identify dysmorphic neurons in pediatric epilepsy tissue using images generated by spatial transcriptomics. His model successfully distinguished dysmorphic neurons at high accuracy. Matt’s research was supported through Penn’s Grants for Faculty Mentoring Undergraduate Research (GfFMUR) program.

We are proud of Aidan and Matt for their excellent work and for sharing their research with the Penn undergraduate research community!