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An NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
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I am an Assistant Professor of Health Informatics in the Department of Health Information Management within the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, with a secondary appointment at the Intelligent Systems Program (ISP). I am also leading our efforts at the Pitt HexAI Research Laboratory. I am also affiliated with the Center for AI Innovation in Medical Imaging (CAIIMI). Starting from August 2022, I am honored to serve our community as the Vice Chair of IEEE Computer Society at Pittsburgh. I have a deep passion for AI-Powered healthcare informatics and health data science with better patient diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment using largescale
multiple clinical data sources and advanced computational algorithms.
I am currently collaborating with Dr. Kurt Weiss on a research project entitled "Using Artificial Intelligence to Predict Response to Therapy in Adult and Pediatric Sarcomas", awarded by Pitt's Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). The main goal of the project is to develop, train, test, and validate deep learning medical image analysis algorithms and computer vision methods to predict response to therapy in sarcoma, localizing and characterizing CT and MRI findings in predicting response to the therapy.
Dr. Talbott's areas of expertise are in environmental and cardiovascular epidemiology. Dr. Talbott has worked closely with both state and local health departments to conduct health studies investigating potential linkage of environmental exposures and health effects.
My current cancer-related research focuses on caregivers or people with advanced cancer, stress response, cancer outcomes and symptom science. I have a currently funded study of LGBT+ Cancer caregivers.
Dr. Tatsuoka is Professor of Medicine and he co-directs the Biostatistics Facility at Hillman. He provides biostatistical expertise for data analysis, clinical trial and study design, and grant preparation. He has a broad collaborative background. His own methodological research has been and is currently funded by NSF and NIH, and his interests include adaptive experimental designs, such as in clinical trials and classification analyses, high performance computing, and imaging data.
My research has been rooted in developing and applying new technologies involving “high content” imaging methods to biomedical challenges. We have been applying quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) to multiple disease areas including liver diseases and solid tumor cancers. My interests include integrating QSP with patient microphysiology systems (MPS) to generate pathophysiological experimental and computational models to create a powerful paradigm in drug discovery and development. The latter has led to developing patient digital twins and patient biomimetic twins for liver diseases together with creating the BioSystics-Analytics Platform to manage, analyze, share and computationally model patient and biomimetic twin data. We spun-off BioSystics that merged with Nortis, Inc. to form NUMA Biosciences, a precision medicine company. In addition, our development of next generation spatial biology analytics for highly multiplexed fluorescence image data from patients led to the formation of PredxBio to address patient heterogeneity in drug discovery and development.
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Dr. Taylor’s research interests include targeted and novel treatments of gynecologic cancer, correlated biomarker development for defining personalized cancer therapy, and screening and early detection of gynecologic cancers, particularly in individuals with hereditary predisposition to cancer. Her collaborations extend to colleagues within the Women’s Cancer Research Group at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. As an interdisciplinary team of researchers, their focus is on overlapping research interests regarding patients’ quality of life, health services research, and patient-reported outcomes. This work is crucial to addressing all aspects of cancer care, which extends beyond cancer directed therapies.
Lauren Terhorst is a professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy with secondary appointments in the School of Nursing and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. She is also the co-director of the SHRS Data Center. Her primary area of expertise is related to applications of statistical methodology in health science research. She is a co-investigator and biostatistician on several grants from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). She serves as a reviewer for peer-reviewed journals and national funding agencies. She has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in journals of high impact in health science. She is active in teaching and mentors SHRS students in methodology and statistics.
Dr. Tersak is board-certified in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology. She provides care for pediatric oncology patients and long term survivors of childhood cancer. She is extensively involved in clinical research including the evaluation and treatment of patients with new diagnosis and research in the area of medical late effects and quality of life in childhood cancer survivors.
We investigate signaling pathways that integrate membrane traffic with the regulation of homeostasis and the onset of disease, including cancer and autism, and we leverage these discoveries to develop targeted therapies. Our studies are grounded by our discovery of the PACS family of multi-functional sorting proteins. Currently, we are investigating how the PACS proteins regulate key deacetylases, including SIRT1 and HDAC6, to control signaling pathways impacting cancer cell death, obesity, and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Dr. Thomas is a leader in promoting self-advocacy among patients with cancer. She has developed a model and measure of how patients advocate for their needs and priorities within the context of their cancer experience – the Self-Advocacy in Cancer Survivorship Model. Currently, her research evaluates the impact of a theoretically-based, patient-centered serious game (a motivational video game) intervention on women with advanced cancer’s self-advocacy skills, symptom burden, and use of health care services (R37CA262025 - NCT04813276). She also works with clinical nurses to understand how nurses can promote self-advocacy among their patients. Dr. Thomas’s other areas of interest include cancer symptom management, caregiver burden, instrument development and testing, and financial distress related to chronic health problems.
My research interests focus on studying the relationship between environmental hazards and cancer, examining whether socio-cultural, biological, and behavioral determinants may mediate or moderate these relationships. I use a broad toolkit of research methods, including quantitative and qualitative methods, geographic information systems (GIS), and spatial statistics, to characterize risk factors and test hypotheses.
I am an ion channel physiologist with long term interests in basic ion channel regulation and activation and the contributions of altered channel function to disease. I have been funded all my career by NHLBI, NIA and NIEHS and have developed strong interests in the contribution of ion channel dysfunction to cellular, molecular and metabolic remodeling in vascular proliferative diseases and lung obstructive diseases. Nevertheless, I have consistently maintained an interest in the nascent and exciting field of "ion channels and cancer". I have consistently had one postdoc (sometimes two) working on ion channel dysregulation in breast and colon cancer and glioblastomas and we have published several influential papers on the subject.
Dr. George Tseng is Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Departments of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh. He also has secondary appointments in Human Genetics, and Computational and Systems Biology. He received BS (1997) and MS (1999) in Mathematics from the National Taiwan University under Dr. Hung Chen, and ScD (2003) in Biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health under Dr. Wing Hung Wong's lab. He joined Pitt since 2003 and leads a research group in Bioinformatics and Statistical Learning. His research interests focus on statistical modeling and applications for -omics and bioinformatic problems to improve precision medicine and human health. His research group has published 90+ methodological/major papers and 115+ collaborative papers (as of Mar 2023), in addition to co-invention of 5 patents. He has received multiple awards, including ASA Fellow, Statistician of the Year (ASA Pittsburgh Chapter), and Provost's Award for Excellence in PhD Mentoring (University of Pittsburgh). Collaboration with biological and clinical labs plays an important role where most of his projects and methodological ideas come from.
Dr. Tseng has actively served in the statistical community, including President of ASA Pittsburgh Chapter in 2014-2017 (President-Elect, President and Past-President), Chair of ASA Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics (SSGG) in 2023-2025 (Chair-Elect, Chair and Past-Chair), and Board of Directors of International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) in 2024-2026.
Dr. Tyagi’s research interests include application of intravesical drug delivery techniques and urinary biomarkers to advance the diagnosis and care of bladder cancer, prostate cancer, benign prostatic hyperplasia and interstitial cystitis/painful bladder syndrome.
