Dr. Ham’s research interests include the use and further development of proteomic technologies and mass spectrometric approaches to enhance the discovery of protein biomarkers for personalized medicine. She is interested how protein biomarkers could be used to better understand the mechanisms by which drugs may produce their therapeutic effect and to distinguish subsets of disease that may require a more personalized therapeutic approach. Specifically, these biomarkers would be used to a) track therapeutic effectiveness or resistance of drugs through the understanding of their mechanistic therapeutic effect and b) find new molecular targets for the development of drugs for both new targeted therapies and co-therapies. She has a particular interest in using these technologies to study various forms of breast and colon cancer, primarily with respect to how drugs and resistance to drugs change the proteome, with a particular focus on tyrosine kinase inhibitor resistance. She is also interested in the role that protein post-translational modifications play in the disease process and their potential use as biomarkers.
