Peter Sims joined Columbia in 2012 as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. Researchers in his laboratory are working to improve single-cell approaches to systems biology. These approaches are crucial because individual cells respond in different ways to identical chemical and genetic perturbations, and because clinical samples are often limited to small numbers of cells. Translating new and existing techniques for genome-wide analysis to the single cell level will facilitate their application to biomedicine. The Sims Lab develops new tools for single-cell analysis, applying cutting-edge microscopy, next-generation sequencing, and microfabrication to enable unbiased, system-wide measurements of biological samples. He and his colleagues focus on single-cell transcriptomics and sequencing technology along with novel approaches to proteomics, where current tools lag far behind those available for nucleic acid analysis.