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Fridley Lab

About the Lab

The Fridley lab is focused on the development of novel statistical and bioinformatic methods to answer questions that arise in cancer and pediatric research. Recently, the lab has been working on analytical methods and software for understanding the spatial architecture of the tumor immune microenvironment and how this is related to clinical outcomes by leveraging the information in single-cell protein (funded by a NIH/NCI R01 CA279065) and spatial transcriptomic (funded by a NIH/NCI U01 CA274489) experiments.  

A list of recent software developed by the Fridley Lab is listed below in addition to the Lab’s GitHub page. 

  • iTIME (interactive Tumor Immune MicroEnvironment): a shiny application that creates interactive figures for examining spatial organization of individual tumors and provide basic spatial and summary information. Lead Developer: Dr. Alex Soupir    
  • spatialTIME: R package for visualizing and analyzing single-cell protein data for studying the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME).  Lead Developer: Dr. Alex Soupir  
  • spatialGE: R package that provides visualizations and quantification of the tumor microenvironment heterogeneity through gene expression surfaces, spatial heterogeneity statistics that can be compared against clinical information, spot-level cell deconvolution and spatially informed clustering, all using a new data object to store data and resulting analyses simultaneously. Lead Developer: Dr. Oscar Ospina  
  • NB.Mclust: R package for Negative binomial model-based clustering of RNA-seq data. Lead Developer: Dr. Qian Li 
  • IntNMF: R package for Integrative clustering of multiple genomic datasets with Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). Lead Developer: Dr. Prabhakar Chalise  
  • InterSIM: R package for Simulation of Inter-Related Genomic/Molecular Datasets. Lead Developer: Dr. Prabhakar Chalise  

Leader

Brooke Fridley, PhD, joined Children’s Mercy on December 18, 2023, as the Scientific Director of the Biostatistics and Epidemiology Core (BEC) in the Division of Health Services & Outcomes Research. She also holds the Stanley H. Durwood Endowed Chair for Health Informatics. 

Dr. Fridley's research focuses on statistical genomics, molecular epidemiology of cancer, cancer genomics, and pharmacogenomics. Her research efforts have also resulted in the development of new statistical methods and software for analyzing high-dimensional molecular studies of complex diseases. Her lab’s research into developing these new statistical methods resulted in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Informatics Technology for Cancer Research U01 grant and a National Cancer Institute R01 award in 2023.

Throughout her career, Dr. Fridley has collaborated on numerous genomic and cancer research projects, including pediatric cancer studies. As a result of these research collaborations, Dr. Fridley has published over 290 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Before joining Children’s Mercy, Dr. Fridley was the Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and the Scientific Director of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Shared Resource at the Moffitt Cancer Center. Prior to that, she was the Director of Biostatistics and Informatics Shared Resource at the University of Kansas Cancer Center and the Site Director for K-INBRE (Kansas Idea Network of Biomedical Research Excellence) Bioinformatics Core at the University of Kansas Medical Center. She also has served as faculty at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Dr Fridley received her MS and PhD in Statistics from Iowa State University.

The Stanley H. Durwood Endowed Chair for Health Informatics was made possible by a grant from the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation, Trustee Charles J. Egan, Jr., and a matching gift from Donald J. Hall. This endowment provides support to research in health outcomes and informatics that informs oncology research and care.

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Headshot of Brooke Fridley, PhD
Brooke Fridley, PhD

Director of Biostatistics and Epidemiology Core (BEC); Professor of Pediatrics, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine

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