Simon L. Freedman

Staff Bioinformatics Scientist at Illumina

Staff Bioinformatics Scientist

Illumina, Inc.

Chicago, IL

I am a theoretical and computational physicist with extensive experience developing and leading scientific research across academia and industry. I use physics, statistics, and computation to understand complex biological data, with a particular interest in multi-omic measurements. In recent years, my work has focused on proteomics and development of the SomaSeq Discovery Assay.

Before joining Illumina in 2022, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at Northwestern University with Madhav Mani, where I studied developmental transitions in transcriptomic data. I earned my Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago with Aaron Dinner, studying the structure and dynamics of cytoskeletal networks.






Here’s a talk I gave at the 2022 APS March Meeting:

selected publications

  1. Revealing cell-fate bifurcations from transcriptomic trajectories of hematopoiesis
    Freedman, Simon L., Xu, Bingxian, Goyal, Sidhartha, and Mani, Madhav
    bioRxiv 2021
  2. A versatile framework for simulating the dynamic mechanical structure of cytoskeletal networks
    Freedman, Simon L, Banerjee, Shiladitya, Hocky, Glen M, and Dinner, Aaron R
    Biophysical journal 2017