Dr. Jennifer Borowsky initially trained as an Anatomical pathologist in Australia with a special interest in Gastrointestinal Pathology. Subsequent to completion of her training and attainment of Fellowship with the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (RCPA) she chose to begin graduate-level PhD training to gain a solid experimental grounding for her chosen career as a clinician-scientist. After completion of her first year of PhD training, which has culminated in a first author, peer-reviewed academic paper in Modern Pathology, one of the leading pathology journals, she joined Shuji Ogino’s Molecular Pathological Epidemiology (MPE) laboratory at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Her research area of focus is the development of a novel and ground-breaking technique for analyzing the tumor immune microenvironment in colorectal cancer.

Dr. Borowsky’s approach utilizes a multiplexed, immunofluorescence-based assay to interrogate the T cell populations in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples of archival human colorectal cancer tissue. Coupled with a machine-learning algorithm that she trained for automatic image segmentation and cellular phenotyping and quantification, her research is anticipated to leverage extensive data which in combination with whole exome sequencing data and extensive epidemiological data from large cohorts (the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study) is expected to produce high impact and timely contribution to the field of tumor immunology. Additionally, Dr. Borowsky has drawn from her pathology expertise to make substantial contributions to a breadth of research including the relationship of Bifidobacterium and colorectal cancer morphology, the role of YAP1 in regulating the tumor immune response, and analyzing anthropomorphic variables such as body mass index (BMI) in relation to colorectal cancer morphology and molecular features.