Professor Jen Poynter

The overarching goal of this work is to understand the molecular epidemiology of pediatric germ cell tumors (GCTs) and myeloid malignancy. This research involves comprehensively evaluating the molecular alterations in these rare tumors to discover differences across the histologic subtypes using methylation analysis, mRNA expression, genetic variation, and miRNA expression. Software including R, BWA, HISAT2, and Python is used to analyze data from genome-wide array genotyping and sequencing studies. These analyses can help uncover pathways that are important in the pathogenesis of cancer and can also be useful for identifying new therapeutic targets.