Dr. Heiser earned her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh, and completed postdoctoral studies under the direction of Paul Spellman at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. During her postdoctoral work, she developed algorithms to analyze and integrate genomic and proteomic datasets into a computational model of deregulated cell signaling in breast cancer. Her research focuses on the genomic and epigenomic changes that drive oncogenic behavior in breast cancer, with the goal of identifying aberrations and pathways associated with therapeutic response and resistance.