Crawford Lab

Summary

The Crawford Lab is a research group led by Lorin Crawford, affiliated with Microsoft Research New England and the Center for Computational Molecular Biology at Brown University. The lab develops machine learning algorithms and statistical methods to study the genetic architecture of complex traits. They have extensively benchmarked the scaling properties of Single-Cell Foundation Models (as of 2026-06-09).

Research Focus

• Statistical Genetics: Developing models to map genomic variants to phenotypes and interpret complex gene-gene interactions (epistasis).
• Foundation Model Benchmarking: Evaluating the behavior of Single-Cell Foundation Models across different dataset scales and diversity schemes.
• Geometric Data Analysis: Applying shape analysis and topological data tools to study biological imaging and molecular structures.

Citations

• Lorin Crawford's Lab Website: https://www.lorincrawford.com/ (as of 2026-07-19)
• Key Publication: DenAdel, A. et al. (2026). Evaluating the role of pretraining dataset size and diversity on single-cell foundation model performance. Nature Methods, 23, 1447–1457. DOI: 10.1038/s41592-026-03120-y. Source paper: s41592-026-03120-y.pdf