Maggie is a Ph.D student of Dr Torsten Nielsen at Department of Pathology, UBC. Her undergraduate study is Cell Biology and Genetics, and she holds a Master of Medical Sciences degree from the University of Hong Kong. Maggie's thesis was trying to apply bioinformatics tools to predict protein-protein interaction sites. She gained extensive experience with microarray and clinical bioinformatics from her time with Genetic Pathology Evaluation Centre.
Research Interests
The ultimate goal of her research is to identify a set of useful biomarkers applicable in a clinical setting that defines breast cancer patients by their underlying biology, and to identify patient groups that respond better to adjuvant treatments. Other potential therapeutic targets identified by gene expression profiling will be validated on tissue microarrays consisting of 4500 breast cancer tumors, with results linked to anonymous clinical outcome data. In this fashion, the hundreds of potentially significant genes defining key molecular subtypes of breast cancer will be distilled, on the basis of their clinical importance, into a small set of biomarkers that can be applied diagnostically with current hospital technology.
