Sebastiano Cultrera di Montesano

Postdoc @Broad Institute | PhD @ISTA

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center, a research initiative
within the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard that bridges machine learning and
biology to advance human health. My research focuses on building computational
models of cells to predict and simulate their behavior in response to genetic or
chemical interventions. I am part of the Ex Vivo Project, a Broad/Microsoft
collaboration focused on engineering and targeting cell states in cancer.

I co-organize the Models, Inference & Algorithms (MIA) seminar at the Broad.

I hold a PhD in computational topology and geometry from the Institute of
Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), where I worked under the supervision of
Herbert Edelsbrunner.

News: • Our paper introducing hierarchical cross-entropy for cell-type annotation is now published in Nature Computational Science (2026)!
• scDataset was highlighted by Tahoe Therapeutics for accelerating large-scale single-cell deep learning (2025) in this blog post.

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center, a research initiative within the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard that bridges machine learning and biology to advance human health. My research focuses on building computational models of cells to predict and simulate their behavior in response to genetic or chemical interventions. I am part of the Ex Vivo Project, a Broad/Microsoft collaboration focused on engineering and targeting cell states in cancer.

I co-organize the Models, Inference & Algorithms (MIA) seminar at the Broad.

I hold a PhD in computational topology and geometry from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Herbert Edelsbrunner.