State-of-the-Art Plenary Lecture (SA)

Scott Atwood, PhD, University of California, Irvine

A Multi-Omic View of Basal Cell Carcinoma

Scott Atwood, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology with a joint appointment in Dermatology at the University of California, Irvine. His laboratory studies how epidermal stem cell heterogeneity drives skin homeostasis and disease. Specifically, Dr. Atwood’s interest lies in how protein kinase regulation of signaling pathways drive stem cell heterogeneity, basal cell carcinoma progression, and the immune response. His recent focus on analysis of signaling networks in mammalian skin and skin cancer using single cell RNA-sequencing provides a framework to discover novel therapies and improve skin modeling using human skin equivalent organoids. His collaborative work continues to characterize drug-resistant basal cell carcinoma, identify alternative therapies to attack tumor growth, and to spatially define human skin and human basal cell carcinoma at single cell resolution.