Dr Shi's research explores cell-type variation in anticancer drug response. By combining experimental measurements of cellular alterations induced by drug treatment with kinetic modeling of pathway dynamics, the ultimate goal is to understand how different anticancer drugs perturb cellular behaviors and what variables as well as interaction modules in cellular pathways are the determining factors in engendering distinct drug response phenotypes in different cell types. Current focus of the lab is to investigate regulations of cell death, in particular programmed cell death, triggered by anticancer reagents, such as anti-mitotic drugs and DNA damaging drugs, because induction of cell death appears to be highly variable among different human cell lines in response to anticancer reagents. A wide variety of experimental approaches are employed in Dr Shi's lab, including live-cell imaging, image-based high-throughput screening, FACS, EM and mass spectrometry. As for kinetic modeling of pathway dynamics, the lab collaborates with Dr Hao-yuan Kueh at Caltech and Prof. Qi Ouyang at Peking University. Projects that are in progress in the lab include,

3. Dynamics of p53 pathway in deciding cell fate of senescence or apoptosis in response to different DNA damaging reagents.