Heather Kates, Ph.D., a bioinformatics scientist specializing in integrative multi-omics analysis, has been named co-leader of the UF Health Cancer Institute’s Computational Biology Unit within the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Shared Resource.
Kates succeeds Li Chen, Ph.D., who has taken on a new role as scientific director of the Bioinformatics Core at the McKnight Brain Institute. She will co-lead the unit with Qianqian Song, Ph.D.
“I’m excited to strengthen partnerships across computational biology, bioinformatics and Cancer Institute teams by driving innovative, reproducible multi-omics analyses that advance high-impact collaborative research,” Kates said.
Kates is a bioinformatics analyst and has been working in the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Shared Resource since 2025. She designs reproducible analyses using gold-standard and innovative methods, while also building shared infrastructure in collaboration with other teams.
In her collaborations with Cancer Institute members, Kates specializes in spatial transcriptomics and integrative multi-omics analysis, connecting genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic profiles to questions of cancer development, progression and treatment response.
The Biostatistics and Computational Biology Shared Resource provides a range of bioinformatics and computational biology support for cancer researchers, including analysis and annotation of high-throughput genomic assays; assistance in the development of bioinformatic components of grant proposals, protocols and manuscripts; development of analysis tools and pipelines for high-performance computing environments; application of AI, machine and deep learning methods to multi-source high-dimensional data; and development of novel prediction models using -omics data platforms.
