Office
(631) 444-3000
Email
Robert.Powers@stonybrookmedicine.edu
Stony Brook Medicine
Department of Pathology
Basic Sciences Tower, Level 9
101 Nicolls Road
Stony Brook, NY 11794-8691
R. Scott Powers, PhD
Professor, Department of Pathology,
Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University
Research Program
Oncogenic Drivers and Mechanisms of Carcinogenesis
Department
Research Interest
I am a cancer genomics and computational oncology investigator with extensive experience developing integrative genomic, transcriptomic, and functional approaches to uncover mechanisms of tumor–microenvironment (TME) interactions, epistatic gene relationships, and therapeutic vulnerabilities in cancer. My research has evolved from genomic discovery and functional validation to high-dimensional single-cell analysis, spatial transcriptomics, network modeling, and systems-level computational biology.
My group pioneered methods for identifying amplified oncogenic drivers such as PPM1D, PRC17, KCNK9, and ACK1; elucidated the architecture of multi-driver amplicons (YAP/BIRC2, NKX2-1/NKX2-8/PAX9, CCND1/FGF19); and discovered the FGF19–FGFR4 dependency in hepatocellular carcinoma. More recent computational studies defined mechanisms of neutrophil-driven vascular occlusion, senescent CAF–mediated immunosuppression, and PDAC tumor–stroma signaling networks.
My current projects include quantifying how local stromal, immune, and vascular niches impose selective pressures that drive transcriptional reprogramming and state transitions in malignant cells, using spatially resolved cancer-cell state definitions across PDAC and breast cancer generated by integrating scRNA-seq, Visium, and CosMx data with targeted immunohistochemical validation, and developing mathematical frameworks to model how the TME actively induces and reshapes cancer-cell states. Another major project is a generalizable network-divergence framework for detecting adaptive transcriptional reprogramming and selective vulnerabilities across diverse cancer types.
Education
PhD, Biological Sciences, Columbia University, NY
BA, Mathematics, Carleton College, MN
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found HERE.