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Kathleen Sprouffske

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Revision as of 17:20, 31 March 2008 by Kathleen (talk | contribs)

I'm Kathleen Sprouffske, a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania in the Genomics and Computational Biology program. I am studying the dynamics of cancer progression.


Here's my brand new webpage


Answers to Dan's Questions follow:

  1. What are your main interests? Feel free to include a "pie in the sky" big idea!
    • I am interested in using the tools of evolution and ecology to study the dynamics of cancer development and progression.
  2. What sorts of expertise can you bring to the group?
    • I have a decent knowledge of the cancer literature and the relevant ideas from evolution. More practically, I can program in a number of languages, including perl, python, R, Objective C, and java. I definitely prefer object-oriented approaches. Also, I have created agent-based models using NetLogo and Swarm.
  3. What do you hope to get out of the CSSS?
    • I am very excited to meet and learn from everyone at the program. In particular, I have limited exposure to nonlinear dynamics and am really looking forward to that.
  4. Do you have any possible projects in mind for the CSSS? (Recall that you will all be working in groups on at least one project with the goal of presenting your progress on the last day and finishing up a paper by summer's end.)
    • To understand cancer, we must understand how a single group of cells (or a single cell) can acquire the 6 or 7 phenotypes necessary for cancer. One of the things I'm interested in is the possibility that there is non-random separation of the DNA strands during mitosis [1], which presumably is protective in terms of cancer. This has been modeled as a Moran process for stem cells here and I'd like to explore other modeling strategies.