Faculty Spotlight

Rachael Hageman Blair

Rachael Hageman Blair.

As someone who’s run 12 marathons in her life, Rachael Hageman Blair isn’t one to shy away from new challenges, whether it’s balancing work with family life or breaking new ground in cancer research.

“It’s a high-risk, high-impact project that has the potential to bring us closer to personalized medicine and, in particular with this project, to leverage computational biology to make predictions about things we can’t measure. ”
Rachael Hageman Blair, PhD, Associate Professor
Biostatistics

An associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics, Hageman Blair recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Mathematical Sciences that will develop mathematical models of skin and breast cancer metabolism. The project embeds probabilistic graphical models of gene networks into traditional deterministic models of cellular metabolism.

“It’s kind of a new frontier for systems biology,” said Hageman Blair, who obtained both her PhD and MS in mathematics from Case Western Reserve University, and a bachelor’s in mathematics from SUNY Fredonia. “It’s exciting to me because this has never been done. It’s a high-risk, high-impact project that has the potential to bring us closer to personalized medicine and, in particular with this project, to leverage computational biology to make predictions about things we can’t measure.”

Hageman Blair’s research will advance the work that has already been achieved using mathematical models to clarify networks of molecular traits from high-throughput data. “Despite this progress, integrating diverse types of data remains a major challenge that has limited our ability to take full advantage of the wealth of post-genomics data for knowledge and discovery,” Hageman Blair’s research abstract said.

“This project addresses this challenge and represents a bold new direction in systems biology, which can be generalized to model different biological systems. A broader impact of this project is the software development, which aims to bridge the gap between computational and experimental biology by putting accessible tools in the hands of the biologist.”

A native of Orchard Park, NY, Hageman Blair joined UB after working as a postdoctoral associate at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, from 2007 to 2011. In addition to her research work—she is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center—Hageman Blair teaches a two-part hybrid course in SPHHP called Statistical Data Mining I and II.

She proposed the course series in summer 2011 to fill a gap in the biostatistics graduate program, which up until then lacked coursework in data mining. With her and her husband expecting their second child that fall, Hageman Blair wanted to balance family life with offering the course, so she worked with SPHHP’s online programs coordinator, to develop the course.

The first four weeks of the course were strictly online. Twenty-two students enrolled in Data Mining I last year and included students from a variety of academic departments, such as geography and industrial engineering.

In the spring, Hageman Blair oversaw Data Mining II, a classroom-based course that included a smaller group of students. Hageman Blair received teaching awards for both sessions.

In addition to providing much-needed curriculum in the school, the course has given Hageman Blair, who has two young boys, the flexibility to achieve a work-life balance. “I try to be present when I’m at UB and present at home. I check my phone at the door,” she said..