Michael C. Oldham, PhD, is a neuroscientist and Associate Professor in the Brain Tumor Center and Department of Neurological Surgery at UCSF. The overarching goal of his research is to understand the molecular basis of cellular identity in the CNS in health and disease, with a particular emphasis on adult malignant gliomas. Toward this end, his lab combines in silico deconvolution of intact tissue samples with single-cell analysis to identify highly robust molecular signatures of distinct cell types and cellular processes in neurobiological systems. As a UCLA graduate student in the lab of Dr. Daniel Geschwind, Michael worked closely with Dr. Steve Horvath to perform the first analysis of transcriptional covariation in the human brain and discovered highly reproducible gene coexpression modules that had been invisible to differential expression analysis. Based on this work he was unanimously selected as a UCSF Sandler Faculty Fellow (http://fellows.ucsf.edu/) and invited to start his own lab at the UCSF Eli & Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research shortly after finishing graduate school. After completing his Sandler Fellowship, Dr. Oldham was recruited to join the faculty of the Department of Neurological Surgery at UCSF and apply the unique computational and experimental strategies he has developed to study molecular features of CNS cellular identity in health and disease.