Dr. Gardner currently serves as the Senior Vice-Chair of the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology and the Director of the newly established Digital and Computational Pathology Laboratory (DCPL) at Columbia University. He is also the Director of the ABP approved Physician-Scientist Research Pathway in Pathology at CUMC. Before that, Dr. Gardner was a Senior Investigator at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and acting Deputy Scientific Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, where he oversaw and directed the health disparities research of tenure track investigators, staff scientists, and staff physicians. While at NIH, Dr. Gardner extended and refocused the efforts in my lab to define and reveal how alteration and/or disruption of gene regulation contribute to cancer incidence, evolution, and outcome. This extended to quantitative profiling of antigens in patient tumor samples. An essential and overarching goal of this effort is to translate the biological implications of these observations into principles and tenets that will have a broader impact on the molecular understanding of disease. The ultimate objective is to provide new strategies for improving the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer. To accomplish this Dr. Gardner’s lab incorporates molecular, biochemical, and cell biological methodology with genome-wide bioinformatics and computational technology to assemble a research portfolio that leverages multi-disciplinary translational applications, to define molecular links between race, lifestyle, the environment, and disease. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and while at NIH, received two NIH Director’s Awards for “exceptionally innovative application of both basic and translational approaches to defining the mechanisms of gene regulation and their role in the evolution of cancer” and for “conducting the first research to clearly define a possible molecular mechanism linking metabolic imbalance with increased breast cancer risk”.