
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University @JHUCompSci @HopkinsDSAI working on computational genomics + ML
Baltimore, MD
Joined September 2018
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New life update! 🎆
🎓 This Fall, I will be joining the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University (@JHUCompSci) as an Assistant Professor, with an affiliation at the new Data Science and AI Institute (@HopkinsDSAI).
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
Update:
Hundreds of papers published (the package) ✅
The author list is "the consortium" ✅
Raw data not released ✅
Within days errors found in multiple publications ✅
One person claims credit for all the work of the consortium and compares himself to Newton ✅
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
Come work with us @JHUCompSci! We're hiring tenure-track faculty in all areas, with a particular focus on
- AI systems
- AI safety and security
- AI reasoning and alignment
- AI ethics, policy, and governance
apply.interfolio.com/194231
(DMs are open if you have any questions)
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining @Columbia in the CS Department as an Assistant Professor in January 2027, in New York City.
My lab will work on advancing causality, AI, experimental design, and biomedical applications.
I’ll be taking on PhD students and recruiting postdocs. If you’re interested in working with me, consider applying to the CS PhD program this fall or reach out at [email protected].
Do spatial transcriptomics foundation models (SFMs) actually learn biologically meaningful spatial patterns? 🧬
Excited to share our new work assessing if current spatial foundation models learn multi-scale spatial variation in gene expression (spoiler: mostly no)
Our results suggest that future SFMs need to explicitly model local+global spatial variation in the architecture, pre-training and/or fine-tuning
cc some great points on single cell/spatial FMs made by Jian Ma xitter.cf/jmuiuc/status/20903253…
very comprehensive Review on single-cell foundation models from @JiayuanDing, @Xiaojie_Qiu, @TheodorisLab, and colleagues. After going over it, I would encourage the authors to make it more critical rather than primarily an inventory of models.
First, I think Fig 1 needs some rethinking. The definition of scFM has become too loose. For example, the actual model unit of GET is celltype pseudobulk aggregated from scATAC-seq, hence not single cell model. Also thanks for highlighting our TissueNarrator, but we certainly do not consider it a bona fide scFM - it is a specialized spatial transcriptomics model built by leverging an existing foundation LLM (Qwen). TissueNarrator is very interesting and we re having lots of fun w/ it but it's not a scFM. Anyway - Fig 1 seems to mix FMs, specialized models built on FMs, and task-specific models into one big family tree.
More broadly, I think the more interesting question for a scFM review in 2026 is not how many scFMs now exist or how their architectures differ, but what has the scFM paradigm actually bought us? Since the first wave around scBERT/Geneformer/scGPT, the number of models, parameters, and pretraining cells has exploded, but as a field we are not convinced that capabilities have advanced proportionally.
- Where has large scale pretraining enabled something that a strong specialized model could not do ?
- Where do scFMs consistently beat strong task specific or even simple baselines?
- Where is the broad evidence for true cross-context generalization on biologically interesting tasks?
The Review mentions many of these challenges indeed, but I think they should be much closer to the central theme of the article rather than appearing mainly in a later Challenges section :-)
I might almost suggest to flip the review around and instead ask:
- what have we actually learned after several years and many scFMs?
- What claims have survived independent benchmarking?
- What has scaled and what has saturated?
- What capabilities are genuinely attributable to pretraining and where do we still need much more evidnece?
- What important biological problems remain essentially unsolved by scFMs ?
Given the current rate of model proliferation, there may be another 50 scFMs by this time next year and this inventory / figure will become outdated very quickly. To me, a more useful and timely "state of the field" critique would be much more valuable and long-lasting than another "model zoo" review .
Work led by master's student Dhanav Handa, w/ co-authors Cristina Martin Linares, @GenesOfEve, Jon Ling
Accepted to MLCB 2026 as a spotlight + will be published in PMLR
Paper: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Code: github.com/chitra-lab/saffro…
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
We’re excited to announce DiG-bench, a new benchmark for discovery!
Over the last few weeks we’ve been testing frontier AI models on our novel discovery games and seeing how they score. Each game is a text-based environment, so they probe discovery capabilities in the natural domain of language models, rather than requiring additional, potentially confounding, visual understanding.
TL;DR frontier models have improved a lot over the last few months. But they are still stumped by some surprisingly simple problems, even in their native text domain.
With
@cocosci_lab (@Princeton) @MITCoCoSci (@MIT) @SchmidhuberAI (@KAUST_News) @misovalko (@Inria) @tri_dao (@PrincetonCS) @RMBattleday @zebkDotCom @FraserGreenlee @akaijsa @ClareMaguire @TimMuller1 @kubicek_ales @physicscat0x7d @SukritSumant @thoughtchannel_
(1/5)
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
I graduated! So grateful for my fantastic mentors Stefan Wager, @lihua_lei_stat and @PaulFNiehaus and wonderful Stanford community.
Thrilled to start as an Assistant Professor at Columbia DRO! I'll be working on addressing societal challenges using ML + causal inference.
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
Life update! Excited to share I'll be joining Johns Hopkins University as an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering (@JHUBME) in January 2027! I’ll be based in the Data Science and AI Institute (@HopkinsDSAI) with a secondary appointment in CS (@JHUCompSci). (1/6)
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
I'm excited to share our new preprint "Vermeer: Autoregressive generative modeling of microscopy predicts protein localization," a collaboration between @MSFTResearch and @insitubiology!
Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Protein localization is fundamental to protein function, but experimental imaging, a key technique to study localization, cannot scale to the entire human proteome across all biological contexts.
To address this challenge, we introduce Vermeer, an autoregressive generative model trained on Human Protein Atlas data @ProteinAtlas. Vermeer synthesizes fluorescence microscopy images of proteins conditioned on cell morphology reference stains and protein sequence embeddings (ESM-C).
Vermeer can leverage latent information about protein localization in the ESM embeddings to generalize to proteins the model has never seen during training. (1/n)
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
Get to know @uthsavc, who joins @JohnsHopkins as an assistant professor of computer science and faculty in @HopkinsDSAI! Read our Q&A with him here: cs.jhu.edu/news/new-faculty-…
New postdoc opportunity at JHU!
If you're interested in doing a postdoc with me or others at JHU, apply here.
Join us in advancing data science and AI research! The Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is now accepting applications for the 2026–2027 academic year. Apply now! Deadline: Jan 23, 2026. Details and apply: apply.interfolio.com/179059
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
Carta leverages lineage tracing data to infer the optimal trajectory of cell differentiation.
nature.com/articles/s41592-0…
an elegant and extremely efficient (method-of-moments) test for epistasis in human traits
congrats Boyang, Ali et al!! super excited to see this work published 🙂
🧬 Do genetic variants interact in humans?
For years, the answer was “probably, but we lacked solid statistical evidence.” We now bring one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date.
Thrilled to share our latest work, FAME, now at Nature Genetics: nature.com/articles/s41588-0…
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
Using a new deep learning algorithm, researchers at @Princeton have designed an approach to map the cellular organization of tissues by modeling spatial patterns in molecular data.
bit.ly/3MlUvfQ
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
The Department of Computer Science is pleased to welcome 9 new tenure-track faculty to its ranks this academic year! Featuring @anand_bhattad, @uthsavc, @zihyunchiu, @krisgligoric, @murat_kocaoglu_, @_ziyang_, @tizianopiccardi, @yaxingyao, & @zakynthinou: cs.jhu.edu/news/nine-new-ten…
Uthsav Chitra retweeted
Unique Molecular Identifiers (UMIs) in RNA-seq are supposed to be… unique. But what if they don’t have to be?
In our new preprint w/ Dylan Agyemang + @rafalab, we show that UMIs can be shorter—if you use the right estimator. 1/12
TissueMosaic is a super cool method for contrastive ST analysis with lots of rigorous benchmarking -- congrats @SandeepKambham2 et al!!
TissueMosaic, our method to study how changes in tissue structure across conditions affect cell-intrinsic function, is now out @CellSystemsCP!
cell.com/cell-systems/fullte…



























