Rendeiro group

Andre and Lisa took part in the 1st Conference of the European Federation for Aging Research (EFAR) on the Biology of Aging, held from October 14th to 16th at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and the CECAD Research Center in Cologne.

Andre gave a talk on our tissue clocks work, and Lisa presented a poster on her work on chronic inflammatory skin conditions.

Thank you to the organizers for leading the creation of a Europe-wide effort to bring aging research together and for a great first edition of the conference!

Yimin Zheng leaves the lab. As the lab's first postdoc he was instrumental in setting the pace in methods development and data processing, with excellent coding skills, while always being available to help others.

His contributions include the Marsilea visualization framework, the LazySlide/WSIData stack, and the tissue-clocks project.

Thank you, Yimin - we wish you all the best for your next steps!

Andre gave a talk at the UMC Utrecht Spatial Omics Symposium 2026.

Thank you to the organizers for the kind invitation! Andre was impressed with the local research environment, enjoyed the talks, and looks forward to new collaborations.

We joined the workshop for grantees of the WWTF "Understanding biology with AI/ML" call at the Impact Hub Vienna, where teams shared their projects, offers and asks, and discussed how to build models that reflect real biology.

Juliane Winkler presented our joint project on the multiscale discovery of cellular and microanatomical determinants of breast cancer metastasis, and Yimin, Eva, Fatemeh and Andre also took part in the workshop.

Thank you to the WWTF for organizing it!

Yimin Zheng's project LazySlide was chosen by the jury for the Support Award of the LBG OIS Early Career Researcher Award 2026, given by the Open Innovation in Science Center of the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft.

The award honors early career researchers who apply Open Innovation in Science (OIS) methods in their research. The Support Award recognizes an OIS project with development potential, and comes with consulting and mentoring from the OIS Center experts to take LazySlide's openness and collaboration further.

Congratulations, Yimin!

Ernesto, Parijat and Tamas represented the lab at the 3rd Conference of the European Society for Spatial Biology, "Painting a new biology", held from September 28th to October 1st in Sitges, near Barcelona.

Ernesto gave a talk on our work on tissue-specific aging from histology, and Parijat and Tamas each presented a poster.

Thank you to the organizers for a great meeting!

We had a great time at our yearly lab retreat in Dürnstein, Austria, where we discussed our research, shared ideas, and enjoyed the beautiful views over the Danube and the Wachau valley.

It was a great time to think more deeply about our mission, bond with each other, and share nice and fun experiences.

A special thank you to Ernesto, Lisa and Yimin for organizing the retreat, and to the CeMM back office team for their help!

Charlotte Westhoven joins the lab as a PhD student in the CeMM PhD Program.

After a Bachelor's thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology and a Master's in Heidelberg with a thesis at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) on oncolytic virotherapy in pancreatic cancer, she most recently worked on spatial transcriptomics (Xenium) of immune-related adverse events at Heidelberg University Hospital.

She brings experience in single-cell and spatial data analysis - welcome, Charlotte!

A profile piece on Andre's scientific career trajectory was published in the Österreichische Ärztezeitung, the official journal of the Austrian Medical Association.

Thank you to Ursula Scholz for the opportunity and the interview!

Our study revealing how human organs age at different rates is now published in Nature Medicine.

Led by Ernesto Abila, Iva Buljan, and Yimin Zheng, the work introduces histological aging signatures derived from pathology images that can monitor tissue-specific aging and predict disease.

Read the paper at doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04566-5 and explore the code at agingpath.

Our manuscript describing StainX is now available as a preprint on BioRxiv.

StainX is a Python package for GPU-accelerated batch stain normalization of histopathology images, achieving 8-11x speedups over standard PyTorch implementations through optimized CUDA kernels.

The manuscript, led by Samir Moustafa, details the algorithm implementations and benchmarking.

Read the preprint at doi:10.64898/2026.08.06.743198, install with pip install stainx, and check out the GitHub repository.

Ariadna Villanueva Marijuan has been awarded the DOC Fellowship (Doctoral Fellowship Program) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).

The DOC fellowship is a highly competitive program that supports outstanding doctoral candidates across all areas of basic research, enabling them to focus on their dissertation with dedicated funding.

Ariadna is the first PhD student in the lab to receive a fellowship: a major achievement!

We are all proud of you Ariadna! Congratulations!

Ariadna, Ernesto and Shrestha attended the Ascona Workshop: Statistical and AI methods for multi-modal multi-scale modeling of biological systems at Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland.

The workshop (28 June - 3 July 2026) addressed current challenges in integrating and interpreting multi-modal datasets across biological scales, bringing together leading researchers in statistics, machine learning, systems biology and biomedicine.

Thank you to the organizers Niko Beerenwinkel, Valentina Boeva, Peter Bühlmann and Wolfgang Huber for this excellent workshop that has been running for many years!

Marsilea, our framework for composable visualizations has been selected for a spotlight on Github Maintainer Month.

The feature contains an interview with Yimin, who conceived and maintains the project.

Open source runs a large fraction of the world's digital infrastructure, but this is thanks to the largely unrewarded efforts of open source maintainers worldwide.

Thank you to the Github Community Management team for the opportunity to celebrate maintainers of open source software.

We had a very nice dinner together at 'In Dish', an Indian restaurant in Vienna's first district.

The food was delicious, the spirits high, and it was great to see so many people together.

Thanks Lisa for the restaurant suggestion, Samir for organizing, and everyone for joining!

For the first time our team ran together in the Vienna City Marathon relay.

CeMM was the proud sponsor of the race and it was great to meet and run with colleagues from the institute!

Yimin, Lisa, Tamas and Andre together ran the 42 km in 4 hours and 11 minutes.

We finished with a nice photo at the MuseumsQuartier - thanks everyone for joining and doing your best!

The event held in Padova, Italy over 4 days focused on SpatialData, the basic data structure underlying spatially resolved data within the scverse ecosystem.

SpatialData also underlies WSIData, the data object LazySlide uses for whole slide image analysis.

The hackathon had an ambitious program, with themes including design modernization, bioconducted compatibility, and visualization.

Samir and Yimin focused both on SpatialData design and its modernization.

Thank you to the organizers and to the whole community for coming together and working on this fundamental software!

Andre has been elected as a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).

The Young Academy brings together excellent early-career scientists from diverse disciplines to contribute to the Austrian scientific landscape and engage in interdisciplinary exchange and outreach.

We are honored by this recognition and look forward to contributing to the Academy's mission.

Our framework for accessible and interoperable whole slide image analysis is now published in Nature Methods.

This work was led by Yimin Zheng, who developed the core architecture enabling scverse-compatible analysis of histopathological images at scale.

LazySlide brings the interoperability and efficiency of single-cell genomics workflows to computational pathology, lowering barriers for researchers across disciplines.

Check out the documentation at lazyslide.readthedocs.io and the code at GitHub.

We are honored to receive the Experiment Foundation's Beyond the Journal Award, recognizing scientists pushing the boundaries of open science.

The award acknowledges our commitment to transparency through our publicly hosted, open-source lab manual that makes internal workflows and computational practices reusable by the community.

We are grateful for this recognition and remain committed to embedding reproducibility into our daily research culture.

Read more about the award and the other awarded project here

Clemens Kohl joins the lab as a postdoctoral researcher.

After studying Food Science and Biotechnology in Vienna, he did a Master at ETH Zürich in Basel, Switzerland, and a PhD in Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany.

With a strong background in single-cell analysis and clustering methods the lab will gain a major bridge to the genomics and single-cell field, as well as a close connection to the group of Georg Busslinger at the Medical University of Vienna which jointly hosts him.

We wish Clemens a happy and successful time in the lab - welcome!

Lisa Kleissl has been awarded the prestigious APART-MINT fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).

This competitive fellowship supports outstanding early-career researchers in the natural sciences, technology, and medicine and will support her work for one year.

Congratulations Lisa on this well-deserved recognition of your ideas and research!