RESEARCH INTERESTS
Ultimately the goal of my research is to contribute knowledge relevant to improving the prevention and/or treatment of cancer in humans. The biological processes responsible for carcinogenesis and the study of disease in humans are both inherently too complicated for either of these goals to be met by a single definitive experiment, a single methodology, or a single scientific discipline. My approach to research is to acknowledge this interdependency, and to work with a core of collaborators with the same overall goals and different scientific expertise. Such cross-disciplinary collaborations provide a coherency in which to examine the contributions that a given experiment makes towards the ultimate goal. One focus of my recent research has been the development of a probabilistic framework which specifies when experiments with different methodologies and from different disciplines can be meaningfully combined and interpreted, and what future experiments can be done to support or refute these interpretations. The second aspect of my research philosophy is also based on the fact that progress in understanding, preventing, and treating human cancers is an incremental process. At any point in time, rather than think in terms of a specific study or small set of studies, I explicitly conceptualize my research agenda in terms of a sequence of experiments where the sequence is determined by the results of previous experiments.