Heather Rose Kates, PhD

I lead the Computational Biology Unit within the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Shared Resource at UF Health, where I partner with cancer researchers to design experiments, build reproducible analysis pipelines, and translate multi-omic data into biological insight. My work spans spatial transcriptomics, single-cell multiomics, and bulk sequencing platforms, with a particular focus on making high-throughput analysis accessible, well-documented, and reproducible across a busy shared-resource core.

Before moving into cancer genomics, I spent seven years as an evolutionary genomicist studying plant phylogenetics and domestication — work that left me with a durable habit of asking whether an analysis actually supports the biological claim being made, not just whether the pipeline ran.