Edward Stites, MD, PhD

Ed Stites, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine. His experimental and computational research laboratory brings ideas from mathematics to the study of disease and its treatment, with a focus on cancer. After undergraduate studies in Mathematics (University of Kentucky), he pursued dual-degree MD, PhD training (University of Virginia). His doctoral research focused on the RAS proteins that play prominent roles in many different forms of cancer. By developing a mathematical model of the processes that regulate RAS signaling, he was able to identify new aspects to how RAS functions to promote cancer. While completing his medical degree, he was recruited to the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) for an independent postdoctoral fellowship as the Randy Pausch Scholar. This position enabled him to work on early personalized medicine clinical trials and cancer genomics while also maintaining a research program on RAS-pathway systems biology. He completed his clinical training with a Clinical Pathology residency at Washington University School of Medicine. He began his faculty career in 2017 at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where his lab combined experimental and computational methods to study clinically important problems involving RAS proteins, expanded the application of its computational approach to additional cancer promoting proteins, and integrated epidemiology with genomics to characterize cancer promoting mutations in the cancer patient population. In the summer of 2022, he relocated his laboratory to Yale University in order to embed his research program in an academic medical center and to resume clinical activities.