What Is My Background?

I received my Ph.D. training in genetic epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. Following my post-doctoral training in cancer bioinformatics at the National Cancer Institute, I worked at the Center for Inherited Disease Research at Johns Hopkins as a statistical geneticist and became the Director of Statistical Genetics before joining Moffitt.

What Do I Do At Moffitt Cancer Center?

I joined Dr. Sellers’ group as a senior biostatistician in 2008.  My research interest includes genetic susceptibility in cancer risk and genomic contribution to cancer treatment outcomes. I am actively involved in a large ovarian cancer genome-wide association study (GWAS) and a post-GWAS investigation to integrate multiple GWAS studies from different continents to identify genetic variants associated with ovarian cancer risk. I am also interested in genetic variants in pathways associated with prognosis of glioblastoma (GBM) patients.

What Is My Contribution To This Research Program?

First, I contribute extensively to grant submissions and preparation of manuscripts. Second, I contribute my past experience on genotyping and data cleaning/data quality control to the ovarian cancer studies. Under the guidance of Dr. Sellers and other collaborators, I have successfully integrated genotyping results from various GWAS studies and will focus on identifying and validating additional genetic variants in ovarian cancer. This means staying current on analysis methods and bringing new developments into the lab.

Dr. David Fenstermacher received his doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the fields of bioinformatics and biomedical informatics, David spent fourteen years as a molecular biologist/geneticist working on several projects, including phage display technologies, FISH for cytogenetic applications, cDNA cloning and transcriptional analyses.  His background as a bench scientist brings a unique perspective to the design of computational tools to support basic and clinical research studies. Dr. Fenstermacher has held several faculty positions at the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of South Florida and the Moffitt Cancer Center.

What do I do at Moffitt?

Dr. David Fenstermacher is the Chair/Executive Director of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute.  Dr. Fenstermacher has designed information management systems for scientific projects that include the integration of research subject clinical data; data quality methodologies, development of web-based forms for input, storage and retrieval of all clinical and research data, customized data representations, and data sharing using data warehouse and Grid technologies.  Current research focuses on developing informatics resources specifically for comparative effectiveness research.

What is my contribution to this research program?

Dr. Fenstermacher leads the informatics and data management center for the ovarian cancer GWAS study and also participates in the administrative core and the data analysis team.   

What Is My Background?

I received my B.S. in Physics at Jilin University in China in 1998, and M.S in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN in 2001. I worked as a doctoral graduate research assistant in the field of Machine Learning at Vanderbilt University before joining Moffitt in 2005.

What Do I Do At Moffitt Cancer Center?

My job title here at Moffitt is Bioinformatics Specialist, in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. My job is to provide support in software/database development, automated knowledge discovery, data management, and computational analysis for research projects at Moffitt. My research interests are in Statistical Learning, Automation and Visualization.

What Is My Contribution To This Research Program?

My main contribution to the GWAS and U19 studies is that of data management, pipeline automation, cluster computing and algorithmic analysis. I receive and distribute datasets from and to the collaborators outside of Moffitt. I keep the genotype data organized in the storage space attached to our computing cluster. Working with others in the group, I help create and run automation and cluster computing scripts for genotype quality control, strand correction, harmonization, association testing, imputation, pathway enrichment testing, SNP interaction testing, and dataset extraction. I help analyze the memory and time efficiency of the various computation tools used in the project. I analyze the source code of the software (PLINK, MACH, GWAMA, etc.) used in our project to ascertain the exact meaning of specific terms and formulas. And finally, I coordinate with our IT department to maintain adequate storage space for our project.

What Is My Background?

I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and have lived in various parts of the United States including Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio, before moving to Florida. I received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biology and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Spanish from the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa in 1998.  I then pursued a Master of Science degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Genetics, with Specialty in Genetic Counseling at the University of Minnesota. In 2001, I began working as a genetic counselor at Moffitt’s Lifetime Cancer Screening and Prevention Center where I spent the majority of time counseling families and conducting research related to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility. In 2005, I decided to continue my educational pursuits and entered the doctoral program in Epidemiology at USF. I hope to successfully defend my dissertation and graduate in Fall 2010.

What Do I Do At Moffitt Cancer Center?

Currently I am working as a Research Data Analyst in the Division of Population Science (within the Department of Cancer Genetics and Epidemiology) under the guidance of Dr. Sellers.  The data I work with derives from our ongoing genome-wide association study (GWAS) of ovarian cancer, and has served as the foundation for my dissertation work related to evaluating the association(s) between germline variants in mitochondrial-related and microRNA-related genes and ovarian cancer risk.  My responsibilities have also included coordinating study-specific tasks across participating GWAS centers and co-writing grants with Dr. Sellers.

What Is My Contribution To This Research Program?

I am committed to fighting the battle against highly lethal diseases such as ovarian cancer.  Having spent many years getting to know women and families affected by this disease, I understand how important it is to identify women at high risk for ovarian cancer, and to develop novel strategies to detect it at an early, curable stage.  I hope my greatest contribution to this research program is my passion and drive for designing and conducting excellent team science with the ultimate goal of minimizing the public health burden of such grim diseases.

What Is My Background?

I received my bachelor’s degree in Biology from Fudan University, China and received my Ph. D degree in Biochemistry from Texas A&M University. I have eight years of research experience in bioinformatics and computational biology, focusing on protein sequence analysis and protein structure prediction.

What Do I Do At Moffitt Cancer Center?

I joined the Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource Facility at Moffitt Cancer Center as a Bioinformatics Specialist in June of 2008. As a bioinformatics specialist, my duty is to direct and guide the use of computational bioinformatics analysis methods, data mining and the interpretation of generated results.  That includes assisting with investigator research projects, working with software developers to provide custom applications and databases using current bioinformatics tools and resources, providing training and support for research scientists to use bioinformatics tools and resources for their research project.  I also act as liaison between the bioinformaticist and biomedical research scientists to interpret needs and deliver bioinformatics resources as required.

What Is My Contribution To This Research Program?

In this research program, I apply my bioinformatics expertise to evaluate, analyze and annotate SNPs and genes of interest. I also take part in developing and maintaining pipelines and databases to analyze, store and share research data and findings.

What Is My Background?

I received my bachelor degree in Zoology from National Taiwan University.  I shifted my career focus slightly and obtained my Ph. D. degree in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at Medical University of South Carolina.   In the summer of 2008, after two years of postdoctoral training in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University, I found a good home at Moffitt Cancer Center where I could contribute to cancer research by developing and applying statistics and bioinformatics tools. 

What Do I Do At Moffitt Cancer Center?

I am an assistant member in the Department of Biostatistics and have been working closely with my collaborators, including genetic epidemiologists, clinicians, and basic scientists.  My research primarily has been focused on developing statistical methods and computational tools to incorporate multiple sources of large-scale genomics and proteomics data, select biologically relevant markers, and predict clinical outcomes in a unified framework.  Facing additional challenges observed in the high-throughput datasets, such as nonlinearity and high noise levels, my work on nonparametric methods for the detection of nonlinear and multi-scale correlation has enabled the identification of key genes for the development of pathological conditions, which might have been missed by traditional linear methods. http://labpages.moffitt.org/chenya

What Is My Contribution To This Research Program?

I provide statistical and computational support for analyzing the US ovarian cancer genome-wide association study (GWAS), lead by Dr. Sellers.  I am particularly interested in performing statistical inference by integrating multiple sources of information, such as pathway information.  Recently, I was awarded an internal grant (ACS-IRG) to develop statistical methods to simultaneously select relevant pathways and SNPs for cancer genome-wide association studies.  I look forward to contributing to this exciting field of research by incorporating additional data types into analyses in an integrated fashion in the near future.

What Is My Background?

I received my undergraduate training and doctorate from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I then did postdoctoral work at the Rockefeller University in the laboratory of Lasker Award winner Hidesaburo Hanafusa where I discovered a key function of the breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene (BRCA1). Before moving to Moffitt I was Assistant Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, in New York City from 1998 to 2003

What Do I Do At Moffitt Cancer Center?

I am an Associate Member in the Cancer Epidemiology Program (Population Sciences Division) and the head of the Laboratory of Cancer Genetics and Genomics. Research in my laboratory focuses at applied (genetic testing and risk assessment) and fundamental (transcriptional activation, DNA repair, and cell signaling) aspects of cancer. I am also the Director of Recruitment and Admissions for the PhD program in Cancer Biology.

What Is My Contribution To This Research Program?

My group is focusing on developing functional analysis tools to explore how the loci associated with disease can be understood in terms of the biology and to define the mechanism of risk enhancement of individual SNPs. I’m the PI of Project 2 in the U19 grant and that requires extensive collaboration with the other Project investigators and the Admin Core.

What is my background?

As a native New Englander, I made the decision to move to Tampa after running out of creative expletives for the annual onslaught of snow and ice. Prior to moving south and starting at Moffitt I worked for ten years as Program Director for a non-profit agency that assisted adults with serious and persistent mental illness to live as independently in the community as possible. With the same organization, I then assumed the position of Grants & Projects Director for five years, which gave me the opportunity to learn the art of proposal writing, grant management, and project development. In addition to earning a BA in political science from Siena College in Loudonville, NY, and a MS in gerontology from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, I am continually amazed at how much there is still to learn from my daily interaction with so many dynamic individuals at Moffitt.

 What do I do at Moffitt?

As a Senior Research Administrator in the Office of Sponsored Research (OSR), I am responsible for grant proposal submissions and must be the go-to person for many of the researchers in the Cancer Prevention and Control Division at Moffitt. I serve as their lead contact for pre-award administration, proposal development and processing, negotiation and acceptance of awards, project set-up, and issuing of subaward agreements.  Working collaboratively with the very proficient OSR team, as well as many others who have involvement in the pre-award process, gives me the opportunity to assume new challenges almost on a daily basis, and to brainstorm with others the most effective and positive resolutions possible.

 What is my contribution to this research program?

To be involved in a massive project like the preparation of this large cooperative agreement is to experience a range of emotions; anticipation, exasperation, optimism, anxiety, and ultimately relief and satisfaction. Maintaining a mischievous sense of humor is the best tool I have to face these challenges and to put things in their proper perspective. The many trials involved with coordinating budgets from multiple sites, ensuring we’re all within regulatory guidelines, and working within restricted funds was offset by the delight of working with many bright, engaging, and amicable people from our many collaborative institutions. It’s a marvel to me that this disparate group of people was so easily able to work around various time zones and institutional procedural differences, to still manage to pull together the myriad components necessary for a successful proposal. From concept to the time of award was nothing less than a stellar example of teamwork within Moffitt departments and from all of the consortium participants.

What is my background?

After a two year stint at the University of Kentucky (a true blue Wildcat fan), I began my working career moving from an insurance underwriter for many years to a working seven years as assistant to the Principal at a private school my two children were attending. A fellow co-worker at the school had said she was leaving to work for the Moffitt Cancer Center (which at the time I had never heard of) and said I should check into it. On a whim I applied for several positions I thought I might be interested in and accepted an entry level Senior Secretary position in August of 1993.  It was very different from what I had been used to in my previous career but I knew that Moffitt was going to grow and I found that I could make a career for myself here.  As the years went by I had the pleasure of working with many wonderful people which brought me to my current position as Senior Executive Assistant with Dr. Tom Sellers who assumed the Associate Center Director position when he came to Moffitt in the summer of 2003.

 What do I do at Moffitt?

My position as Dr. Sellers’ assistant is to keep his calendar updated, schedule his travel, and coordinate all other activities assigned.  Since there are several grants he is PI on that also means organizing conference calls and completing the meeting minutes in a timely manner.

What is my contribution to this research program?

I wasn’t quite ready for all the conference calls that ensued when I took this position; what was a haplotype-based genome screening loci? Allele frequencies?  SNPs and iCOGS? Cases and controls? Are you kidding me – and I was to take minutes on all this? It was like learning a foreign language! But over the next few years and after sitting in on many calls I’ve learned what most of the terms mean and can understand most of what is being discussed – although still way over my head!  Its been very fulfilling to pull together all of the information that goes into creating a grant; whether it’s an R01 or a U19; but then finding out they’ve been funded makes all the work even more rewarding.