Dr. Molinaro is a principal investigator in the Brain Tumor Research Center at UCSF and the Co-Director of the Clinical and Biostatistics Core for the newly funded UCSF Brain SPORE as well as the Co-Director of the Biospecimen and Biostatistics Core for the newly funded UCSF Brain P01. Dr. Molinaro’s research interests are primarily focused on statistical genetics and computational biology, including prediction, survival analysis and classification with additional curiosities in cancer epidemiology and in the estimation of absolute risk in stratified case-cohort studies. Her research has pertained to predicting clinical outcomes with high-dimensional explanatory variables, such as SNP and methylation arrays, and large-scale epidemiology studies. This has included an adaptation to Classification and Regression Trees (CART) for survival outcomes, the introduction of partDSA, a novel data-adaptive algorithm that builds Boolean combinations of explanatory variables, and a non-parametric method for point estimation based on a stratified case-cohort study design. Dr. Molinaro was recently awarded an R01 by the NCI to expand partDSA for building risk models accommodating various study designs and competing risks. In addition, she has worked with collaborators at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) on comparing cross-validation approaches to validating predictors in small sample sizes and the power of data mining methods for detecting genetic associations and interactions.