New Faculty Member Comes Back to his Undergraduate Alma Mater

The Department of EpiTravisGerkedemiology added another brilliant mind to its faculty when Dr. Travis Gerke started on September 15, 2014. Travis Gerke is a cancer epidemiologist and biostatistician with applied and methodological interests in biomarker research. He received his A.M. in Biostatistics from Harvard University prior to pursuing his doctorate in Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health. His recent work considers how gene expression signatures in tumor tissue can identify non-aggressive types of prostate cancer. Because prostate cancer is widely overdiagnosed, such markers hold potential to reduce high rates and substantial costs of overtreatment. The evaluation of signatures towards this end is methodologically challenging, and Dr. Gerke has developed novel statistical tools to enable their discovery and validation. More broadly, he has a keen interest in how study design may impact high-dimensional analysis strategies, and collaborates as a biostatistician and bioinformaticist on several studies of biomarker data at the RNA, DNA, and protein levels. He was born in Tennessee and was raised here in Florida and attended the University of Florida for two undergraduate degrees.  He received a B.A. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Statistics in 2009.  Dr. Gerke has been braving those cold Boston winters for the last 5 years and decided that it was time to come back to the land of the palm trees and become part of the University where he started it all. He is a great addition to the Department of Epidemiology.