🦠🧫Research Overview🧪🧬
Four main research directions guide our focus🔬:
Our research is organized across four interconnected areas, all grounded in our broader interest in immunology, inflammation, disease mechanisms, and translational biomedical research.
1. Immunology, Inflammation & Disease Mechanisms
· We investigate how immune regulation, inflammatory signaling, and interactions between immune cells and tissues contribute to disease initiation, progression, and therapeutic response.
· Cellular, molecular, and functional experiments are used to study key pathways and biological mechanisms, with multi-omics, spatial and single-cell technologies integrated where they can help identify or prioritize important targets.
· Our work spans tumor immunity and the tumor microenvironment as well as inflammatory, infectious, neurological, metabolic, cardiovascular, and other complex disease contexts.
2. AI, Medical Imaging & Computational Methods
· We develop and apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and computational modeling to biomedical problems including medical imaging, biomarker discovery, outcome prediction, and multimodal data integration.
· Applications include cancer imaging, pneumonia detection, neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders, wearable health technologies, medical image generation, and other biomedical and methodological problems.
· Computational findings are interpreted in the context of biological and clinical questions and, where appropriate, connected with experimental or clinical validation.
3. Toxicology, Pharmacology & Drug Safety
· We study how environmental chemicals, food-related exposures, and therapeutic agents influence biological pathways, immune and inflammatory responses, tissue injury, and disease development.
· Experimental toxicology and pharmacology are combined with network-based approaches, multi-omics, pharmacovigilance, and real-world data to identify mechanisms, safety signals, therapeutic targets, and opportunities for drug repurposing.
· Research includes environmental toxicology, carcinogenesis, cardiovascular toxicity, anticancer drug safety, therapeutic resistance, natural products, and pharmacological mechanisms.
4. Clinical, Epidemiological & Population Health Research
· We use clinical cohorts, population-based datasets, real-world evidence, and epidemiological methods to investigate disease risk, prognosis, treatment outcomes, and population-level determinants of health.
· Cohort studies, genetic epidemiology, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and large-scale health datasets are used to connect biological mechanisms with clinically and population-relevant outcomes.
· These studies extend our mechanistic work across cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders, metabolic disease, aging, and other complex conditions.
Featured Research Focus
Cancer Research
Cancer is a major cross-cutting research focus of our lab rather than a separate methodological category. Cancer-related projects span all four research areas and allow us to connect mechanistic immunology with experimental biology, artificial intelligence, toxicology, pharmacology, and population-level research.
Cancer Biology & Tumor Microenvironment
· Tumor immunity and immune regulation
· Cancer-associated fibroblasts and stromal biology
· Tumor microenvironment and metastatic mechanisms
· Cancer genomics and molecular mechanisms
Cancer Imaging & AI
· AI-assisted cancer detection and medical image analysis
· Brain and bone tumor imaging
· Machine learning for cancer biomarkers and prognosis
· Multimodal and computational oncology
Cancer Therapeutics & Drug Safety
· Chemotherapy and immunotherapy safety
· Pharmacovigilance and real-world evidence
· Drug resistance and pharmacological mechanisms
· Drug repurposing and therapeutic target discovery
Carcinogenesis & Environmental Exposures
· Environmental and dietary carcinogens
· Molecular and network toxicology
· Oxidative stress and exposure-related mechanisms
· Experimental validation of carcinogenic pathways
Cancer Epidemiology & Population Health
· Cancer incidence and population-level risk factors
· Aging and cancer susceptibility
· Clinical and epidemiological determinants of cancer outcomes
· Prevention and population health research
We use immunology as a biological foundation, experimental biology as a major pillar of discovery, and computational and population-level approaches as complementary tools to answer important biological and clinical questions.
