Dr. Gan focuses on brain metastasis in lung and breast cancer, a major cause of death for these patients. She is applying the latest single-cell technologies and developing computational tools to dissect how tumor cells interact with resident brain cells to mediate the progression of metastasis. This research aims to better understand the formation of brain metastasis which may lead to new therapeutic strategies for prevention.

Dr. Gan is developing computational methods to leverage the approximate spatial information of whether a brain cell is near a metastatic tumor cell and coarse tumor progression indicators, such as the postinoculation time and whole-brain ex vivo bioluminescence signal to infer the trajectories of phenotypic states in each type of cell. She is applying these methods to examine how the different populations of cells influence each other to co-evolve along their respective trajectories.