Our Team

Dr. Taube is a pathologist and one of the two PIs for AstroPath. She has developed and validated an approach for pinpointing ~40 immunoactive molecules across large areas of tumor tissue specimens. These maps are imaged using the AstroPath platform and linked through the database to other available data on the specimens and patients, including DNA and RNA-based studies, radiologic images, and clinical data such as treatments received and patient outcomes.

Dr. Szalay—AstroPath’s second PI–is an astrophysicist who led the effort to build a large, open-access, spatially-resolved data portal for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Drawing from the lessons learned over 25 years working on the SDSS SkyServer, Dr. Szalay has architected a data-management and analysis environment to process, host, and visualize the large-scale tumor-immune maps generated by Dr. Taube’s laboratory. The ability to run analyses of the detailed spatial features over hundreds of millions of cells in the tumor microenvironment enable the discovery of rare phenomena at a high statistical significance.