What We Do
Leveraging Big Data, Collaboration, and Professional Development in Undergraduate Research Experiences
Adaptive Therapy
This project tests the efficacy of adaptive cancer therapy regimens using in vitro and in vivo models of colorectal cancer.
Cancer Across Vertebrates
This project focuses on the more broad center goal of analyzing cancer across the tree of life, with an emphasis on the differences in cancer risk between the Sauropsids (birds + reptiles), Amphibians, and Mammals.
Sex Bias in Cancer Risk Across Species
This project focuses on the role sexual dimorphism plays in cancer prevalence across species.
The Language of Cancer
This project seeks to understand how do we talk, or not, about cancer and what implications does that have for patients, families and various interactions and outcomes, such as doctor-patient interactions, choosing a course of treatment, and more.
Metaphors of Cancer
This project seeks to explore the implications of cancer metaphor usage on patient understanding of diagnosis and treatments, as well as determine the types of words patients prefer to use in discussion.
Leukemia
This project aims to develop evolutionary biomarkers of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) progression to improve patient stratification, as well as gain a better understanding of liquid cancers.
Outreach & Cancer Education
The purpose of this project is to engage in science communication and outreach efforts with the purpose of translating scientific findings into everyday knowledge that reaches a broad audience, from children at the elementary school level to various communities.
Past Projects
Comparative Phylogenetic Methods Development
The purpose of this project is to call on single nucleotide variants from groups of samples sequenced at low depth.
Life History Trade-offs in the Emergence of Multicellularity
This project aims to understand how a dynamic environment can allow cooperative cells to survive and thrive under changing conditions. An understanding of this mechanism can allow us to better explain how cells started to cheat, and how cancer suppression systems formed.
A Life History Model of Reproductive Cancer Risk
This project plans to compile reproductive cancer prevalence for mammalian species and model the predictive power of life history traits on the patterns of reproductive cancer prevalence observed.
Life History Framework of Therapeutic Resistance
The primary objective of this project is to work with the adaptive therapy gene expression and exome sequencing dataset. The goal is to determine the life history strategies for cancer cells under different modalities of cancer treatment based on the expression of growth factors, immune blockade, and angiogenic factors.
Diet, Microbiome, and Cancer
The purpose of this project is to look at how diet and the microbiome affect cancer progression.
Age as a Cancer Risk Factor in Nonhuman Species
Age is the single biggest risk factor for cancer in humans so most of this work will emphasize if it is as significant a risk factor in non-human animals. This project will implement common human cancer models such as Kaplan-Meier curves to our animal cancer data.
Cancer-like Phenomena in Coral
The coral cancer project aims to obtain whole genome sequencing from abnormal and neighboring normal samples from the Acropora genus and test if nearby growth abnormalities are clonal, and therefore transmissible cancers.
