Eric D. Siggia

Theoretical biophysicist (Rockefeller University, Center for Studies in Physics and Biology) working on quantitative, geometric models of development. He earns a hub because he is the corresponding-author name attached to the vault's live Waddington-landscape seam: the 2025 method that fits developmental landscapes directly to high-dimensional single-cell data, extending a thread the vault had otherwise only met as 2016-era Hopfield-network formalism. The vault's open question on that work was raised under his name (question-siggia-2025-reconstructs-waddington-landscape-single-cell) before the paper was read.

His 2025 PNAS paper "Reconstructing Waddington's Landscape from Data" (with Dillon J. Cislo, M. Joaquina Delás, and James Briscoe — Briscoe supplies the ventral-neural-tube experimental substrate) reframes Waddington's picture as a Fokker–Planck flow fitted on points sampled straight from measured gene expression, rather than on a hand-built low-dimensional proxy.

References

• claim-cislo-siggia-2025-fit-waddington-landscape-directly-to-single-cell-gene-expression — the direct-fit framework (answers the open question)
• claim-cislo-siggia-2025-landscape-from-discretized-fokker-planck-on-sampled-data-points — the mechanism
• claim-cislo-siggia-2025-validated-on-real-mesc-neural-tube-flow-and-rnaseq-data — validation on real flow-cytometry and scRNA-seq data
• Related landscape thread: claim-hopfield-network-formalizes-waddington-epigenetic-landscape · claim-2016-hopfield-landscape-paper-not-first-cell-fate-attractor-model