Background
PH.D.
M.S.
MLS(ASCP)
CM
Associate Professor Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology
Cancer Research
My research focuses on utilizing clinically collected data for research purposes to further precision medicine. Examples of precision medicine are to use patient history, laboratory values, and genetic data to identify patients who would most benefit from preventative measures or to pick the most effective medication with the least side effects for a patient without the trial and error process. Much of my research has focused on autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Patients with SLE have been reported to have increased risk of some malignancies, but not others. However, the literature is sparse and no study has looked at all cancers in a single population. In collaboration with Dr. Brian Poole in the MMBio department, we used electronic health records from Vanderbilt University Medical Center to identify the risk of numerous types of cancers in patients with SLE, providing reference data for clinicians to better help their patients.
We recently received NIH funding with Dr. Julianne Grose, also in the MMBio department, to study metabolism genes identified in the Grose lab in humans, using the NIH funded All of Us dataset. We are compare variants from three metabolism genes, PASK, USF1, and ATXN2, in 100,000 patients to phenotypes collecting from the patients’ electronic health records. As metabolic pathways greatly influence cancer risk, one of the major groups of phenotypes we are studying are cancers.