- Location
- Zoom and in-person at rooms 10031 and 10032, 10th Floor, 700 University Avenue, Toronto, ON
- Series/Type
- Alumni Event, DLSPH Partner & Affiliate Event, Faculty/Staff Event, Student Event
- Format
- Hybrid
- Dates
- March 6, 2026 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Links
Presented by CANSSI Ontario …
Join us for the next instalment of the STAGE International Speaker Seminar Series (ISSS) with
Elana J. Fertig, PhD, FAIMBE
Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences
Associate Director of Quantitative Sciences, UM Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
University of Maryland, School of Medicine
Free Online Event | Registration Required
Talk Title
Forecasting tumor-immune dynamics in pancreatic cancer
Abstract
This talk presents a hybrid computational and experimental strategy to uncover interactions between neoplastic cells and the microenvironment during pancreatic carcinogenesis and immunotherapy response. Pancreatic cancers are notoriously immunosuppressive, with immunosuppression developing with the cancer and requiring combination treatment strategies to sensitize their microenvironment to immune checkpoint inhibitors at the late stage at which they are diagnosed. New single-cell and spatial molecular profiling technologies enable unprecedented characterization of the cellular and molecular composition of the microenvironment. These technologies provide the potential to identify signaling between immune cells, including immune aggregates, and the microenvironment. Further combining these data-driven spatial multi-omics analyses with first-principles, mechanistic mathematical modeling provides a forecast system that can yield computational predictions to model emergent cell behaviors and response to therapeutic selection. This mathematical forecast system will empower a new predictive oncology paradigm, leveraging computational systems to predict the impact of tumor-TME interactions.
Speaker Profile
Dr. Fertig advances a new predictive medicine paradigm for oncology by converging systems biology with multi-omics technology development. Her computational cancer biology research is inspired by her background as a NASA fellow in weather prediction. She aims to invent computational techniques that blend multi-platform high-throughput with mechanistic mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence methods to forecast the cellular and molecular pathways of tumor progression and therapeutic response over time. Her combined expertise in computational oncology, chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, and tumor immunotherapy ensures translational relevance and mechanistic validation of computational findings. Dr. Fertig has been a leader in establishing spatial multi-omics technologies, matrix factorization, and transfer learning as current mainstays in bioinformatics. Beyond algorithm development, Dr. Fertig’s transdisciplinary expertise enables her to lead large-scale, team-science projects, adapting cutting-edge molecular profiling technologies to human biospecimen research and clinical trials to uncover new therapeutic interception pathways. Beyond the lab, she is a recognized leader in developing new training paradigms that converge oncologists, pathologists, basic biologists, computational investigators, and engineers to advance the next generation of computationally-driven cancer research.
In December 2024, Dr. Fertig was named the Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and the Dean E. Albert Reece Endowed Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine after a nationwide search; and Associate Cancer Center Director of Quantitative Sciences at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Maryland, she was a Professor of Oncology and Division and Associate Cancer Center Director in Quantitative Sciences and Co-Director of the Convergence Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to entering the field of computational cancer biology, Dr Fertig was a NASA research fellow in numerical weather prediction as a graduate student in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation at University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Fertig’s research is featured in over numerous peer-reviewed publications, open-source software packages, and competitive funding portfolio as PI and co-I. She was elected to the College of Fellows American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering (AIMBE) in 2022, serves on the editorial boards of Genome Medicine, Cell Systems, Clinical Cancer Research, and Cancer Research Communications, and as co-chair of the AACR Data Science Task Force.
