About Us
James Brooks, M.D. is the Principal Investigator of the Stanford O’Brien Urology Research Center and Director of the Administrative Core. He is the Keith and Jan Hurlbut Professor, Vice-Chair of the Department of Urology and Chief of Urologic Oncology and is a clinically active urologic surgeon who focuses on prostate diseases. For the past 20 years, he has used genomic approaches to understand urologic diseases and develop disease biomarkers. Dr. Brooks has extensive leadership experience outside of the Department of Urology, serving as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the School of Medicine from 2013-2019, and holding leadership positions in several multi-institutional consortia in addition to leading his laboratory.
Jonathan Pollack, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University. His training is in clinical pathology, cancer biology, and genomics, with a particular focus on DNA copy number alterations (from pioneering array-based comparative genomic hybridization methods to extending newer DNA sequencing-based approaches). A major focus of his research is on prostate diseases, including prostate cancer and more recently focused on BPH. Dr. Pollack was also founding Director of the Stanford Tissue Bank, where for over 10 years he directed a team to consent, procure, process, store and annotate clinical cancer specimens. Dr. Pollack leads Project 1 and is a member of the Biospecimen/Bioimaging Core.
Robert West, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor of Pathology at the Stanford University Medical Center. He is a practicing surgical pathologist with research interests in the molecular events that lead to and sustain tumorigenesis. His laboratory has pioneered methods to profile RNA and DNA in minute specimens (down to single cells) from archival material (FFPE tissues). This method has been adopted as the standard protocol in the Pre-Cancer Atlas in the Molecular and Cellular Characterization Centers of Screen Detected Cancers and is being used in the Moonshot Pre-Cancer Atlas. Dr. West leads Project 2 and the Biospecimen/Bioimaging Core.
Robert Tibshirani, Ph.D. is a Professor of Statistics and Health Research & Policy at Stanford. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Dr. Tibshirani has been a pioneer in the analysis of genomic and proteomic data and is the creator of widely used analysis platforms including hierarchical cluster analysis, Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM), Predictive Analysis of Microarrays (PAM), Singular Value Decomposition, and many others. He will serve in the Biospecimen/Bioimaging Core to analyze cellular and molecular data and develop and apply tools for cross-platform data integration.
Christian Kunder, M.D. is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pathology at the Stanford University Medical Center, where he is a practicing surgical pathologist with clinical and research specialization in uropathology with a focus in prostate diseaes. He serves as lead pathologist in several studies including MRI/histology correlations in prostate diseases and this U54. He is the primary pathologist responsible for the histopathologic characterization of prostate specimens in the Biospecimen/Bioimaging Core.
Michael Angelo, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Pathology and is Co-I of the Biospecimen/Bioimaging Core. Dr. Angelo is widely known for developing Multiplexed Ion Beam Imaging (MIBI) that uses secondary ion mass spectrometry to image antibodies tagged with isotopically pure elemental metal reporters. MIBI enables multiplexed immunohistochemistry, with quantitative detection over a five-log dynamic range. He is applying MIBI to tissue microarrays developed in Projects 1 and 2 to define cell types, cell states and cell neighborhoods in BPH.