Louis Dubeau, M.D., Ph.D., Molecular Biology, Sample Processing and Storage Facility Core Director during the last two funding cycles, will keep this function during the next cycle. He is a certified anatomic pathologist and a member of the medical staff at the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is also trained as a molecular biologist and has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from McGill University (Montreal, Canada). He is the director of a research program on the molecular genetics and biology of ovarian cancer. This research program, which has been funded by NIH since 1989, has made and continues to make extensive use of a variety of molecular biological techniques of potential interest to Core users. Through his research program, Dr. Dubeau has also used several of the campus-wide resources of potential interest to Center members such as expression microarray technologies, proteomics, and DNA methylation analyses. Dr. Dubeau is also director of a clinical molecular pathology laboratory at the Norris Cancer Hospital, where diagnostic tests are being performed on clinical samples using molecular biology approaches. He has considerable experience in applying molecular biology techniques to formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded archival specimens and currently uses such specimens extensively in his research. He wrote some of the first articles on the possibility of using archival specimens for Southern blotting analyses.

Chris Haiman, Sc.D. and David Van Den Berg, Ph.D., serve as Co-Directors of the Core. They contribute to establishing interactions between project scientists and are active participants in the interpretation and analysis of project-specific genotype data. Dr. Haiman has extensive training in Molecular Epidemiology, which was the focus of his doctoral degree received from the Harvard School of Public Health. He has worked closely with epidemiologists and biostatisticians, both in the Department of Preventive Medicine and at other institutions, in developing novel methods for haplotype-based association studies. He has coordinated the biospecimen processing for a large-scale (n = 50,000) blood sample collection in the Multiethnic Cohort study and has established a high throughput genotyping laboratory. Dr. Van Den Berg was the Director of the Genomics Core of the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center until this core merged with the Genomics Center. He had served in that capacity since the establishment of the laboratory in early 2000 and, after the merger with the Genomics Center, became co-director of this Center with Chris Haiman. Dr. Van Den Berg has extensive experience in molecular biology and has a Ph.D. in genetics. Prior to coming to USC, Dr. Van Den Berg established molecular diagnostic laboratories in academia and at a company that rely extensively on the molecular techniques available in the Genomics Core Laboratory and the USC Genomics Center. The Genomics Core Laboratory has provided research support for more than 20 different investigators at USC and has become an integral component of many molecular epidemiology studies.