Jennifer Chan, MD

"Be a sponge. Soak up everything around you, gain as much exposure to different things as you can."

Dr. Jennifer Chan is the Director of the Arnie Charbonneau Cancer Institute and an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, at the University of Calgary. She received her Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Dartmouth College and MD from McGill University. She then completed clinical training in Anatomic Pathology and Neuropathology at Harvard University. Following a research fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, she became a staff neuropathologist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and the Pathology Leader of the Biological Samples Platform at the Broad Institute. Dr. Chan joined the University of Calgary in 2008, where she has clinical duties in Neuropathology at Foothills Hospital and Alberta Children's Hospital, and has a research lab in the Arnie Charbonneau Cancer Institute. She also directs the Clark Smith Brain Tumor and Pediatric Tumor Bank, and is involved in several collaborative projects to molecularly characterize pediatric and adult brain tumors.

Dr. Chan's research program applies concepts from developmental neurobiology to further understand mechanisms of disease in brain tumorigenesis. Her lab is examining the intersection of growth factor signaling and intrinsic determinants such as transcription factor function in cell fate determination and proliferation in neural development and cancer. Their work uses somatic transgenesis to introduce genes of interest into neural stem and progenitor cells to model disease, and is supplemented by in vitro studies using brain tumour initiating cells (BTICs). Projects include defining the role of CIC in oligodendrogliomas, and proneural genes in oligodendrogliomas and astrocytomas.  Another major goal is to use these techniques and reagents to develop more rapid and flexible systems for modeling brain tumors in vivo.