Interview with Jeffrey Farrell, 2026 Elizabeth D. Hay New Investigator Award Winner

9/14/2026

By Liam Russell

The Elizabeth D. Hay New Investigator Award honors early career investigators—those at the pre-tenure assistant professor rank at the time of their nomination—performing outstanding and expansively impactful research in developmental biology. This year’s recipient is Jeffrey Farrell, who since 2020 has served as an Earl Stadtman Investigator in the Unit on Cell Specification and Differentiation at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, MD [1]. His team uses cutting-edge genomics, imaging, and computational biology approaches to investigate genetic control of cell specification and differentiation during vertebrate development; this work extends Farrell’s seminal post-doc work, where he helped develop early applications for single-cell RNA-sequencing to study developmental biology, including the developmental trajectory approach URD.

Farrell grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He began his science journey as a high-schooler, working as a lab assistant and self-proclaimed “rat food chef and autoclave guy” at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. This experience gave him an appreciation for the day-to-day workings of a lab, and inspired him to study cell and molecular biology as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York.

Farrell then completed his PhD at the University of California, San Francisco under Pat O’Farrell—about whom he jokingly insisted, “no relation, I swear!”—studying cell cycle remodeling in the early Drosophila embryo. It was there he became thoroughly enamored with embryonic model systems, and when he began self-identifying as a developmental biologist. Farrell emphasized how the interpersonal connections from his graduate studies stay with him, even now.

“I’m glad to be part of that big scientific family … tons of great scientists have trained [in the O’Farrell lab] at different times, and you run into them all over the world. There’s a lot of joy in that,” he said.

Figure 1: Cover of Science’s 2018 Breakthrough of the Year, featuring a zebrafish embryo imaged by Jeff Farrell [2]

After graduate school cultivated his interests in developmental systems and gene regulation mechanisms, Farrell continued on to investigate cell specification and differentiation during his postdoc in Alexander Schier’s lab at Harvard.

“I learned so much from Alex who was an incredible mentor, but also the rest of the members of his ‘artist colony,’ who remain close colleagues to this day,” he said.

There, Farrell made huge contributions to developmental biology by helping develop early single-cell RNA sequencing pipelines, work that was featured as part of Science’s 2018 ‘Breakthrough of the Year’ [2; Figure 1].

“I feel like I got to be part of something really exciting right at the beginning. I remember an early lab meeting in Alex’s lab,” he recalled, “and I had, like, eight cells sequenced. I think the title of the slide was something like, ‘maybe this could work?’ … that was a really exciting time, trying to push something forward and figure out how to use [single-cell RNAseq] to answer some of the big questions we were asking as a field, and how to make it possible for other people to participate.”

So far in his young lab at the National Institutes of Health, Farrell has kept up the momentum. His group continues pushing the envelope of single-cell genomics approaches, marrying computational, developmental, and molecular biology techniques. While unraveling regulatory mechanisms during development, they also generate open-source analytical tools for other researchers in the field [3].

Recent projects in the lab have focused on identifying previously unappreciated cell types and cell type transitions, including their 2025 work investigating an intestinal epithelial cell type that lacked a molecular characterization, which they continue to work on [4]. The lab is also actively pursuing projects to investigate the developmental regulation of other intestinal stromal populations, including smooth muscle, interstitial cells, and fibroblasts, which they hope will similarly reveal exciting and previously overlooked biology.

Figure 2: 4-day old zebrafish larvae with best4 intestinal epithelial cells shown in green, from recent Farrell Lab work [7]. Photo Credit: Ella Segal and Dan Castranova

Additionally, the Farrell group has a proclivity for cross-group collaboration, contributing ideological and methodological expertise to other labs hoping to leverage single-cell genomics in zebrafish and other developmental systems [5,6,7; Figure 2]. Farrell encourages his trainees to build multidisciplinary skillsets, a quality to which he attributes their broad-reaching success.

“I think there's a lot of power in being a person who can use multiple approaches … I spend a lot of time trying to figure out people’s strengths and weaknesses, and trying to figure out how we can combine that with people’s individual goals to [design] projects that best highlight everyone. I think that’s how to be successful, right? Figure out what you’re good at, then make that your job.”

Farrell’s kind-hearted nature is clearly apparent in the reverent way he describes the people who have contributed to his scientific journey. He specifically acknowledged influential early mentors and teachers, like Deborah Mowschowitz, David York, and Doug Braymer, for “cultivating [my] initial interest in science intellectually, and [showing me] what doing science actually looks like.”

Farrell expressed similar gratitude towards Rahul Satija, a close collaborator from his postdoc [8], remarking, “The success of Seurat is really Rahul’s love, care, and continued investment over [the past] decade, and I’m so glad I got to participate in its beginning.”

When asked how he feels having his efforts recognized by this award, he seemed lost for words.
 “It feels a little crazy, because we’re a field of some really talented people. It meant a lot to be selected out of a group of people I admire so much,” he said.

Farrell also shared his insights about the culture of developmental biology, and how he finds his queer identity fits into his scientific outlook.

“I think the developmental biology community has always been very accepting of a broad set of people with different personalities, you know, different quirks. It was easy for me to fit in here. … While it’s still a conscious effort to [uplift] people of color, queer people, and women in science, I’ve felt when I look at historical pictures that developmental biology was always doing better on that front than other parts of science at the time. And I hope we continue to do better, because it makes us and our science more interesting.” 

Figure 3: Farrell and Rogers Lab visiting the Baltimore Aquarium. Left: Jeff Farrell. Back Row: Victor Naturale (postdoc, Farrell Lab), Will Anderson (technician, Rogers Lab), Katherine Rogers, Jackson Crane (postbac, Farrell Lab), Abhinav Sur (Postdoc, Farrell Lab), Michael Nunneley (postdoc, Farrell Lab), Morgan Prochaska (technician, Farrell Lab), Caitlin Donahue (postdoc, Rogers Lab). Front Row: Ella Segal (postbac, Farrell Lab), Micaela Murphy (postbac, Rogers Lab), Yalan Wu (MD/PhD student, Farrell Lab).

Figure 4: Photo of Farrell lab group attending the 2026 Society for Developmental Biology Mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting. L to R: Gilseung Park (postdoc), Jeff Farrell, Victor Naturale (postdoc), Jackson Crane (postbac), Ella Segal (postbac), Julia Rashid (postbac in Ajay Chitnis lab), Yalan Wu (MD/PhD student), and Michael Nunneley (postdoc).

 

References

[1] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2026, January 16). Principal Investigators: Jeffrey Allen Farrell, PhD. National Institutes of Health. https://irp.nih.gov/pi/jeffrey-farrell

[2] Pennisi, E. (2018, December 20). Science’s 2018 breakthrough of the year: Tracking development cell by cell. Science. https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2018

[3] Evans, A. & Farrell, J. A. (2025). Daniocell Desktop: For interactive reanalysis of wild-type zebrafish single-cell genomic data. Zebrafish, 22(6), 230–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/15458547251376181

[4] Sur, A., Segal, E. X., Nunneley, M. P., Sinclair, J. W., Prochaska, M. K., Dye, L. E., Wu, Y., Fu, L., Shi, Y.-B., Iben, J., Feldman, B., & Farrell, J. A. (2025). Developmental regulation of intestinal best4+ cells. BioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.17.694935

[5] Fishman, L., Modak, A., Nechooshtan, G., Razin, T., Erhard, F., Regev, A., Farrell, J. A., & Rabani, M. (2024). Cell-type-specific mRNA transcription and degradation kinetics in zebrafish embryogenesis from metabolically labeled single-cell RNA-seq. Nature communications, 15(1), 3104. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47290-9

[6] Galanternik, M. V., Castranova, D., Gober, R. D., Nguyen, T., Kenton, M., Margolin, G., Kraus, A., Sur, A., Dye, L. E., Pham, V., Maese, A., Holmgren, M., Gore, A. V., Samasa, B., Goldstein, A., Davis, A. E., Swearer, A. A., Iben, J., Li, T., Coon, S. L., … Weinstein, B. M. (2025). Anatomical and Molecular Characterization of the Zebrafish Meninges. bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology, 2025.04.09.646894. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.09.646894

[7] Morris Little, H., Primack, A. S., Tsverov, J., Nunneley, M. P., Mühlbauer, S., Cox, B. D., Busse, C., Schneid, S., Louwagie, A., Cazet, J. F., David, C. N., Farrell, J. A., & Juliano, C. E. (2025). A molecular, spatial and regulatory atlas of the Hydra Vulgaris nervous system. Development, 152(20). https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.204983

[8] Satija, R., Farrell, J. A., Gennert, D., Schier, A. F., & Regev, A. (2015). Spatial reconstruction of single-cell gene expression data. Nature Biotechnology, 33(5), 495–502. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3192 

Last Updated 09/14/2026