ICM Seminar Series

“Forecasting carcinogenesis through spatial multi-omics”

ELANA FERTIG, PhD, FAIMBE

Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences; Associate Director of Quantitative Sciences, UM Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center; Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology (Secondary)

University of Maryland, School of Medicine

Abstract: Spatial multi-omics have given us unprecedented insights into the cellular regulatory programs of tumors, including the dual tumor promoting and tumor hindering role of fibroblasts. In this talk, we will show how pattern detection methods enable us to infer these programs that can form rules to inform mathematical models to predict their impact on disease progression.

Biography: Dr. Fertig advances a new predictive medicine paradigm for oncology by converging systems biology with multi-omics technology development. Her computational cancer biology research is inspired by her background as a NASA fellow in weather prediction. She aims to invent computational techniques that blend multi-platform high-throughput with mechanistic mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence methods to forecast the cellular and molecular pathways of tumor progression and therapeutic response over time. Her combined expertise in computational oncology, chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, and tumor immunotherapy ensures translational relevance and mechanistic validation of computational findings. Dr. Fertig has been a leader in establishing spatial multi-omics technologies, matrix factorization, and transfer learning as current mainstays in bioinformatics. Beyond algorithm development, Dr. Fertig’s transdisciplinary expertise enables her to lead large-scale, team-science projects, adapting cutting-edge molecular profiling technologies to human biospecimen research and clinical trials to uncover new therapeutic interception pathways. Beyond the lab, she is a recognized leader in developing new training paradigms that converge oncologists, pathologists, basic biologists, computational investigators, and engineers to advance the next generation of computationally-driven cancer research. In December, 2024 Dr. Fertig was named the Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and the Dean E. Albert Reece Endowed Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine after a nationwide search; and Associate Cancer Center Director of Quantitative Sciences at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Maryland, she was a Professor of Oncology and Division and Associate Cancer Center Director in Quantitative Sciences and Co-Director of the Convergence Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to entering the field of computational cancer biology, Dr Fertig was a NASA research fellow in numerical weather prediction as a graduate student in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation at University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Fertig’s research is featured in over numerous peer-reviewed publications, open-source software packages, and competitive funding portfolio as PI and co-I. She was elected to the College of Fellows American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering (AIMBE) in 2022, serves on the editorial boards of Genome Medicine, Cell Systems, Clinical Cancer Research, and Cancer Research Communications, and as co-chair of the AACR Data Science Task Force.

December 2, 2025, 4:00pm – 5:00pm EST

Location: Homewood Campus, Clark Hall Room 110 | Zoom

Recording