Program Members

Summary

Dr. Cauley's primary research interest is the epidemiology of osteoporosis, osteoporosis treatment and the consequences of osteoporosis in both men and women. She also has a major interest in breast cancer and served on the American Society of Clinical Oncology Writing Group about the use of bisphosphonates in women with breast cancer. Her other research has focused on women's health and aging, falls, the interaction between endogenous and exogenous hormones, risk factors, inflammation, and disease outcomes. She examines the physical and psychological changes that occur in postmenopausal women.

Summary

My training is in molecular cancer and environmental epidemiology. Through my doctoral and postdoctoral research, I developed skills in advanced statistical analysis and programming, genetics, epigenomics, and cancer registry analysis. Given my data science skills and ability to translate data results to practice (e.g. grants, research directions, clinic), I was hired to serve as collaborator and resource for HCC investigators and as bridge between the epidemiology and biostatistics groups at HCC. My research interests focus on 1) utilizing cancer registry data to explore socio-economic, racial, and environmental disparities in cancer incidence and mortality and 2) exploring the interplay among toxicants, aging, and dynamic genomic features (e.g., telomeres, DNA methylation and somatic mutations) and the effect of this interplay on cancer development and prognosis. My current research profile at HCC includes characterizing cancer incidence, mortality, and survival disparities and trends in western PA, examining radon and fracking exposures on cancer risk in PA, and evaluating genetic predictors associated with head and neck cancer survival. I plan to become more involved in projects related to environmental somatic mutational signatures in cancer, DNA methylation biomarkers in cancer detection, risk, and prognosis, and other epigenomic and genomic studies of cancer risk and survival.

Summary

Dr. Diergaarde's research examines the role of diet, lifestyle and genetic variation in the development, progression and treatment of cancer, including cancers of the lung, head and neck, colon, ovaries and breast, and aims to identify markers for risk stratification, early detection and response to treatment. She is currently Co-Leader of Project 2 of the UPCI Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in Lung Cancer. This project seeks to establish the relationship between vitamin D exposure, pulmonary inflammation and lung cancer risk and so provide strong rationale for a vitamin D-based approach to lung cancer prevention. She is also Leader of Project 1 of the UPCI SPORE in Head and Neck Cancer. Using data and samples from a large, clinic-based case-control study, this project investigates the role of genetic variation and gene-environment interactions in the development, progression and treatment of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

Summary

Melanoma is a deadly cancer when caught late yet is a surgically curable disease when detected and treated at the earliest stages. Fortunately, most melanomas begin on the skin, and thus we have the opportunity to detect them using visual examination. However, early detection of melanoma can be challenging even for the most experienced dermatologists. This can lead to failure to detect melanoma when it is most treatable or to a high rate of removal of benign lesions. Both increase health care costs and put patients at risk. My research focuses on new techniques to improve the early detection of cutaneous melanoma. Computer vision technology can be applied to the analysis of specialized images of pigmented skin lesions taken using a handheld instrument called a dermatoscope. We are studying ways to use the objective, analytical power of the computer to take a dermatoscopic image of a pigmented skin lesion and rapidly quantify features such as symmetry, size, and color distribution. The system can then compare a lesion that has not been biopsied to a database of images from lesions for which a diagnosis has been made using histopathology following removal (the gold standard for diagnosis of melanoma and other skin lesions) to aid the user in making a decision of whether or not to biopsy. In addition, I am interested in understanding which patients benefit most from screening for melanoma and have several publications that examine melanoma epidemiology, detection patterns, and associations between melanoma screening and outcomes.

Summary

I am an analytical chemist trained in both environmental and biomedical sciences. I have extensively analyzed various carcinogens that are presented in environmental and biological samples. My long-term goal is to integrate exposomics with multi-omics profiles and investigate how the exposome impacts human health, as well as better understand the etiology of chronic and idiopathic diseases. Specifically, I am highly interested in applying our developed approach to studying cancer etiology and prevention.

Summary

My research interests focus on preclinical and clinical development of novel agents from natural products for prevention of prostate and breast cancer in humans and understanding their molecular mechanism of action against cancer using in vitro and in vivo test systems. Natural products include dietary sources (such as garlic, broccoli, watercress, etc.) and traditional Oriental and Indian medicinal plants. Cancer chemoprevention can be defined as the use of natural or synthetic agents to delay, reverse or suppress cancer progression. I am also interested in identifying biomarkers to assess chemopreventive agent response in future clinical trials using cutting-edge Omics technology.

Summary

My cancer research interests focus on the development of tools designed to make information more useful for translational researchers. Since 2014, I have been a co-investigator and then MPI (with Guergana Savova of Boston Children’s Hospital and Jeremy Warner of Vanderbilt University) on an NCIfunded project “Cancer Deep Phenotyping from Electronic Medical Records”(U24 CA248010-01A1). Known as “DeepPhe”, this project is aimed at extracting longitudinal patient histories from clinical notes via Natural Language Processing and developing visual analytics tools that will facilitate the use of this data for cohort discovery. My role in this effort has been to lead qualitative inquiries into clinician information needs and goals, as needed to guide the design of interactive tools. With additional NCI funding starting in 2019, and with the added collaboration of Eric Durbin of the University of Kentucky/Kentucky Cancer registry, we are working to adapt these tools to facilitate cancer registry data abstraction processes (UG3 CA243120-02).

Summary

Prior to joining Pitt GSPH I served as the Associate Director for Population Sciences of the Tulane University Cancer Center for 15 years. I also represented Tulane on the NCI GMAP region 2 consortium. My cancer-related research focuses on cancer health disparities locally and globally with a special emphasis on the Caribbean. Of special interest is the role exposures to chemicals and non-chemicals stressors play in cancer development.

Summary

I am interested in reducing health disparities through understanding the complex pathways socioeconomic status and stress affects cancer genomics and, subsequently population health. My current work focuses on neighborhood socioeconomic metrics that may influence head and neck cancer through the cancer care continuum. I aim to develop a case-control study with prospective follow-up of patients in Western Pennsylvania to elucidate this pathway in head and neck cancer. 

Summary

The primary research interests of the Singh laboratory include molecular characterization of novel cancer chemopreventive agents and rational design of mechanism-driven combination chemoprevention regimens. Cellular and transgenic animal models are used to screen potential cancer chemopreventive constituents from dietary and medicinal plants. Cutting edge cellular, molecular biological, omics (metabolomics and proteomics), structural biology, and imaging techniques (MRI and bioluminescence) are used to (a) determine the mechanism of action of promising cancer chemopreventive agents, (b) monitor effects on cancer progression, and (c) identify biomarkers predictive of tissue exposure and possibly response. Some of the agents under active investigation in the Singh laboratory include: cruciferous vegetable-derived isothiocyanates, garlic-derived organosulides, and medicinal plant constituent withaferin A. As an example, recent published work from the Singh laboratory indicates suppression of glycolysis in mammary cancer prevention by withaferin A in a transgenic mouse model. Likewise, complementary cellular and molecular biological, targeted proteomics, and molecular modeling techniques were used to identify beta-tubulin as a novel target of cancer cell growth arrest by withaferin A (WA).

Summary

Dr. Talbott's areas of expertise are in environmental and cardiovascular epidemiology. Dr. Talbott has worked closely with both state and local health departments to conduct health studies investigating potential linkage of environmental exposures and health effects.

Summary

My research focuses on clinical cancer informatics including digital phenotyping, informatics infrastructure research, cohort explore, disease trajectory prediction, mainly using electronic health records. I have led several NIH-funded projects, which aimed to develop NLP and AI algorithms to automatically extract information from free-text electronic health records (EHRs), such as clinical notes, radiology reports, and pathology reports. I proposed several novel NLP methodologies to improve information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE) from clinical notes and applied those novel NLP approaches in multiple cancer information extraction, for example cancer stage information, histology information, cancer subtypes. I also developed cohort explore tools for cancer clinical trial feasibility studies and patient recruitment using EHRs.

Summary

Dr. Wilson's research interests include: lung cancer screening and chemoprevention, diagnosis, staging and treatment; COPD, especially as it relates to lung cancer; occupational lung diseases; and general pulmonary medicine.

Summary

Dr. Yip's primary research interest is evaluating the role of molecular markers in thyroid and parathyroid cancer to improve risk stratification and optimize efficacy in patient management algorithms.

Summary

Dr. Yuan is a cancer epidemiologist with extensive experience in research on cancer etiology and prevention. Dr. Yuan is Principal Investigator of the Shanghai Cohort Study and the Singapore Chinese Health Study, two population-based prospective cohorts of more than 80,000 Chinese men and women with available baseline blood and urine samples with more than 25 years of active follow-up for cancer and other major health outcomes.

Utilizing these two large cohort resources coupled with a biomarker approach, Dr. Yuan and his research team have made several noteworthy contributions to the field of cancer epidemiology including (1) dietary aflatoxins as human hepatocarcinogens, (2) dietary isothiocyanates, a group of phytochemicals found in cruciferous vegetables, as potential chemopreventive agents against lung cancer development, and (3) urinary biomarkers of nicotine, tobacco-specific nitrosamines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as risk predictors for lung cancer in smokers.

Dr. Yuan also has extensive experience in designing and conducting randomized, double-blind intervention studies on cancer prevention. Dr. Yuan is leading the effort to conduct a randomized, double-blind phase II clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness of dietary 2-phenethyl isothiocyanates (PEITC) supplementation on reduction of risk markers for lung cancer in smokers. In addition, Dr. Yuan, collaborating with Dr. Mindy Kurzer, his former colleague at the University of Minnesota, is conducting a randomized, double-blind phase II clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of oral supplementation of green tea extracts (Polyphenon E) on reduction of risk markers for breast cancer in women.

Summary

My research primarily focuses on the epidemiology and genetics of osteoporosis. A long-term goal is to identify and characterize the genetic factors underlying osteoporosis susceptibility in different ethnic/racial groups. To achieve these goals, we have used several strategies including: population-based candidate gene methods; genome-wide admixture, linkage and association mapping; and most recently, an in vitro cellular model. This later approach is enabling us to translate discoveries made at the cellular level to the 'population' and vice versa to gain insight into the molecular genetic mechanisms underlying osteoporosis susceptibility.