Heather Rose Kates, PhD
Computational Biology Unit Lead, UF Health Cancer Institute
I build pipelines, software, and analyses that turn spatial transcriptomics, single-cell, and other high-throughput cancer genomics data into results investigators can publish, fund, and act on — work that speeds discovery and improves patient outcomes.
I'm a computational biologist and Computational Biology Unit lead with a Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics and 5+ years developing and applying computational methods to integrate high-dimensional functional genomics and multi-omic data for cancer and immunology research. I lead the Computational Biology Unit at the University of Florida Health Cancer Institute, guiding experimental design and analytical strategy for investigators across bulk and single-cell RNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics/proteomics, ChIP-seq/CUT&RUN, WGS, and untargeted metabolomics. I build reproducible, distributed computational pipelines (Snakemake, Nextflow) across HPC and cloud infrastructure, integrate results across multiple data sources to extract meaningful biological insight, and communicate complex findings to interdisciplinary research teams.