Elana Fertig

The Fertig Lab pursues research in the systems biology of cancer and therapeutic response. Our group develops computational methods for pattern detection from genomics data. These algorithms infer the molecular mechanisms that alter cellular signaling processes in human cancer subtypes and during therapeutic response. To this work, I bring significant experience in developing bioinformatics tools that integrate pathway structure in pattern detection algorithms for gene expression data. We also develop new algorithms to integrate diverse high-throughput data modalities. We apply these algorithms to analyze data from diverse cancer types, with a primary focus on head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).

I was promoted to Assistant Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins University in 2013. My work is done in collaboration with numerous clinical and computational investigators, leading to numerous peer reviewed publications, R/Bioconductor packages, winning algorithm for experimental data in the HPN-DREAM8 contest, and independent research funding.