Megha Padi, PhD

Shared Resource Director, Bioinformatics
Cancer Biology Program
Megha Padi, PhD

Biography

Megha Padi earned her B.S. degrees in Physics and Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Harvard University. She then completed postdoctoral training with John Quackenbush at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in computational genomics and network biology. She joined the University of Arizona in 2018 as an Assistant Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the Director of the Bioinformatics Shared Resource at the University of Arizona Cancer Center.

Cancer Focus

My group develops computational approaches for integrating genomic “Big Data” in order to characterize how cellular networks are altered in cancer. Ultimately, we want to unite network science with genomics and build mechanistic models that can explain the heterogeneity in disease progression and drug response. Currently, our research focuses on (i) understanding the way Merkel cell polyomavirus rewires host regulatory networks to induce skin cancer, and (ii) creating context-specific models of drug response in cancer cell lines.