Faculty Directory

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Stanford University

B.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alexander (Alex) Xu is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, with affiliations in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Genomics in the Biological Sciences Graduate Program, the Biophysics Program, the Applied Math, Statistics, and Scientific Computing Program in the Mathematics Department, and the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore. He received his degrees in Materials Science and Engineering and created nanoscale methods for intracellular delivery with Dr. Nicholas Melosh at Stanford. He was an NIH F32 Postdoctoral fellow with Dr. James Heath at Caltech and the Institute for Systems Biology where he created microfluidic platforms and bioinformatic tools for single cell multi-omics. As an Instructor and NIH KL2 fellow in the lab of Dr. Akil Merchant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, he developed bioinformatic pipelines to analyze spatial omics data to generate predictive biomarkers and therapy candidates in cancer. 

• Cancer
• Immunotherapy
• Spatial Omics
• Bioinformatics
• Predictive Biomarkers
• Nanotechnology
• Single Cell Analysis

BIOE689F - Spatial Biology: Bioinformatics, Omics, and Technology

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS

• Spatial Analysis of Ovarian Cancer - Alexander M Xu, Marcela Haro, Ann E Walts, Ye Hu, Joshi John, Beth Y Karlan, Akil Merchant, Sandra Orsulic. "Spatiotemporal architecture of immune cells and cancer-associated fibroblasts in high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma". Science Advances. 2024.
• Spatial Biomarkers in Hodgkin Lymphoma - Tomohiro Aoki*, Aixiang Jiang*, Alexander M Xu*, Yifan Yin, Alicia Gamboa, Katy Milne, Katsuyoshi Takata, Tomoko Miyata-Takata, Shanee Chung, Shinya Rai, Shaocheng Wu, Mary Warren, Celia Strong, Talia Goodyear, Kayleigh Morris, Lauren C Chong, Monirath Hav, Anthony R Colombo, Adele Telenius, Merrill Boyle, Susana Ben-Neriah, Maryse Power, Alina S Gerrie, Andrew P Weng, Aly Karsan, Andrew Roth, Pedro Farinha, David W Scott, Kerry J Savage, Brad H Nelson, Akil Merchant, Christian Steidl. "Spatially resolved tumor microenvironment predicts treatment outcomes in relapsed/refractory Hodgkin lymphoma". Journal of Clinical Oncology. 2024. 
• T Cell Receptor Sequence Informatics - Alexander M Xu, William Chour, Diana C DeLucia, Yapeng Su, Ana Jimena Pavlovitch-Bedzyk, Rachel Ng, Yusuf Rasheed, Mark M Davis, John K Lee, James R Heath. "Entropic analysis of antigen-specific CDR3 domains identifies essential binding motifs shared by CDR3s with different antigen specificities". Cell Systems. 2023.    
• T Cell Receptor Biomarkers - Dalin Li, Ana Jimena Pavlovitch-Bedzyk, Joseph E Ebinger, Abdul Khan, Mohamed Hamideh, Akil Merchant, Jane C Figueiredo, Susan Cheng, Mark M Davis, Dermot PB McGovern, Gil Y Melmed, Alexander M Xu, Jonathan Braun. "A Paratope-Enhanced Method to Determine Breadth and Depth TCR Clonal Metrics of the Private Human T-Cell Vaccine Response after SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination". International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2023
• Single Cell Multi-omics - Alexander M Xu, Qianhe Liu, Kaitlyn L Takata, Sarah Jeoung, Yapeng Su, Igor Antoshechkin, Sisi Chen, Matthew Thomson, James R Heath. "Integrated measurement of intracellular proteins and transcripts in single cells". Lab on a Chip. 2018
• Single Cell Intracellular Delivery - Alexander M Xu, Amin Aalipour, Sergio Leal-Ortiz, Armen H Mekhdjian, Xi Xie, Alexander R Dunn, Craig C Garner, Nicholas A Melosh. "Quantification of Nanowire Penetration into Living Cells". Nature Communications. 2014

ALL PUBLICATIONS

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