Cancer Center researcher honored with College of Science award

Dr. Megha Padi, Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Co-Director of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Shared Resource at the University of Arizona Cancer Center, has been honored with a Galileo Circle Award alongside six other University of Arizona College of Science colleagues. Padi has received the award in recognition of her support for the College of Science administration led by Dean Carmala Garzione.

Padi completed her bachelor’s degrees in physics and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and pursued her Ph.D. in high-energy physics at Harvard University. Motivated by the genomics revolution, Padi switched her focus to modeling Big Data in biology during her postdoctoral training at the Harvard School of Public Health. 

In her lab at the University of Arizona, she integrates genomics, network theory, and cell culture experiments to understand how cellular networks are disrupted in disease. She predicts how cells will respond to therapeutic interventions and validates her hypotheses in the lab. By incorporating insights from molecule biology, she is developing smarter algorithms for identifying drivers of disease. Megha applies these tools to tackle challenging health issues like early-onset colorectal cancer and the evolution of drug resistance. Read more about the 2023 Galileo Circle Awards here.