Dr. Bao is a member of the Hillman Cancer Center (HCC) Cancer Biology Program and Co-Director of the UPMC HCC Cancer Bioinformatics. Using a combination of multi-omics data integration, machine learning, and computer vision-assisted pathology image recognition, Dr. Bao’s work bridges methodological advances and biomedical applications with a direct impact on accelerating the knowledge discovery to new clinical trials that could benefit patients. Her lab focuses on the data-driven discovery of resistance mechanisms to cancer immunotherapy, with major contributions to the identification of WNT/ß-catenin activation as the first tumor-intrinsic mechanism that drives immune exclusion, commensal microbiome as the modulator of anti-PD1 efficacy, and systemic discovery of oncogenic pathways that contribute to the absence of immune infiltration across human solid tumors. Those findings are of particular importance because they provide the scientific rationale to new trials that combine therapeutic targets, such as IDH1 inhibitors, with anti-PD1. Dr. Bao is Co-Leader of Bioinformatics/Biostatistics in the Melanoma and Skin Cancer SPORE and Head and Neck Cancer SPORE programs. She also serves as the the UPMC HCC Informatics Committee, providing critical advice on data accessibility, analysis, integration, and infrastructure for translational research across the Cancer Center. Dr. Bao is a member of The American Association of Immunologists, Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, and Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention.

Dr. Hicks' research addresses computational challenges in single-cell genomics, epigenomics, and spatial transcriptomics leading to an improved understanding of human health and disease. Specifically, she develops computational methods using statistics and machine learning. She implements these methods in open-source software for the analysis of biomedical data.

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Her research philosophy is problem-forward: she develops computational methods and software that are motivated by concrete problems, often with real-world, messy data. This philosophy permeates into her contributions to statistics and data science education, and service to the profession including being an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

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She is also a co-host of the The Corresponding Author podcast, member of the Editorial Board for Genome Biology, an Associate Editor for Reproducibility at the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and co-founder of R-Ladies Baltimore.