Team
Selin Jessa, PhD
Principal Investigator, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute
Selin joins the LTRI on September 1st, 2026, after a postdoc at Stanford University in the labs of Will Greenleaf and Anshul Kundaje. Supported by a CIHR Banting Fellowship and a Wu Tsai Neurosciences Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellowship, she worked on using interpretable deep learning models to infer rules of transcription factor binding site organization in human development. Prior to that, she spent ten years in Montreal. At McGill, she completed a Joint Honours in Computer Science and Biology, and was a founding member of the ECOLE sustainability project. She then pursued a PhD in the lab of Claudia Kleinman at the Lady Davis Institute and McGill University in the Quantitative Life Sciences program, where she used data-driven approaches to identify cell-of-origin in several subtypes of deadly pediatric brain tumors. There, she got hooked on the questions of cell identity and how it’s established in development and disrupted in disease that she continues to study today!
sjessa at stanford dot edu