Manvendra Singh completed his PhD at the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Zsuzsanna Izsvák. In 2019, he joined the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University, New York, as a Postdoctoral Associate in the laboratory of Prof. Cedric Feschotte. He currently leads a computational biology group at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, within the Department of Clinical Neurosciences.

Over the course of his academic career, he has been awarded several prestigious fellowships, including a Helmholtz PhD Fellowship from the Helmholtz Association (Germany, 2012), a Presidential Fellowship from Cornell University (2019), a Postgraduate Scholarship from the University of Bath (UK, 2015) for a six-month research stay, and a Junior Research Fellowship to work for three years at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology on ancient DNA technologies.

His research spans the fields of evolution, genetics, and genomics, with a focus on understanding the mechanisms by which human endogenous retroviruses influence human health and disease. He applies single-cell biology, computational and mathematical approaches, along with genetic and epigenetic functional experiments, to explore retrotransposon dynamics in various human cell systems, including early embryos, placentas, immune cells, and neuronal lineages. He has developed several methods and pipelines to assess transposon regulation and expression from single-cell and bulk sequencing data. His work has led to over 40 peer-reviewed publications (h-index: 24), and he has mentored four graduate students.

Seminar topic: Human Endogenous Retroelements at the Interface of Translational Epigenetics and Diseases (HERITED)