Zip code is the best predictor of health outcomes. Where people live affects their exposure to health risks and access to care. Cancer health disparities are differences in incidence, disease outcomes, survivorship, quality of life after cancer treatment, and burden of cancer. Zeynep Madak-Erdogan will present epidemiological and molecular data supporting a utility for spatial information predicting cancer risk and identifying molecular differences and vulnerabilities to understand breast and lung cancer disparities. She will include examples of how these novel findings can be used to mitigate cancer disparities.
Professor Zeynep Madak-Erdogan is the Sylvia D. Stroup Scholar of Nutrition and Cancer, a Health Innovation Professor at Carle Illinois College of Medicine, Graduate College Faculty Fellow, and the Director of Women’s Health, Hormones and Metabolism lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is also the education program leader at the Cancer Center at Illinois. She received her Ph.D. and undertook postdoctoral studies on mechanisms of estrogen receptor action at UIUC, then joined the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at UIUC in 2014. Her lab uses various animal and 3D-reengineered models, as well as advanced statistical and computational analysis, to understand how nutrients, environmental toxicant exposures, and hormones impact metabolic health and hormone-dependent cancer outcomes. 