Dana Pe'er, PhD

Dana Pe’er investigates cellular development – in particular, how healthy cells shape their identities and build and repair organs, how cancer cells abandon those identities and hijack those processes, and how tissue environments influence an individual cell’s fate. Pe’er and her team combine mathematical approaches with a range of emerging technologies that enable large-scale analyses of single cells. They are developing computational frameworks to characterize cell-state compositions and tissue-level dynamics and seeking to answer a variety of questions related to the causes and consequences of plasticity in development, regeneration, and cancer. For example, Pe’er wants to understand intratumoral heterogeneity which is essential for predicting cancer behavior and identifying molecular vulnerabilities.