Rebecca Halperin Ph.D.

Dr. Halperin is broadly interested in developing and applying methods to gain insight from cancer genomic data that can improve our understanding or tumor biology and inform clinical decision-making. Her current research focuses on the following areas 1) improving calling of variants in difficult samples such as tumor samples lacking matched germline samples, 2) integration of variant calls across tumor samples and data types for improved understanding of tumor heterogeneity and functional implications of alterations, 3) application of immunoinformatics methods to help elucidate how the somatic alterations may allow the patient’s immune system to recognize the tumor.

Dr. Halperin first came to TGen as a research associate right after completing her Bachelor's in Biology and Decision Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  Her experience working on expression microarray and SNP GWAS studies motivated her to go to graduate school.  She earned her PhD from Arizona State University with a thesis focused on bioinformatic analysis and characterization of a peptide array based immunodiagnostic platform.  She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in a computational immunology laboratory where she developed simulation models of B-cell affinity maturation, before returning to TGen for a second postdoc in cancer genomics.