Dr Hirst has over 15 years of research experience and managing scientific research programs. Her research interest particularly focuses on the molecular genetics of carcinogenesis, particularly as it relates to breast and ovarian cancer and understanding how we can better utilize biomarkers for risk stratification and treatment refinement. As Scientific Program Manager in the I-SPY2 TRIAL she oversees biomarker development and works with investigators from both academia and pharma to analyze data, tumor and liquid biopsy specimen using expression arrays, next-gen sequencing, multiplex-IHC and phospho-protein arrays.

As an investigator on a U01 which is part of the NIH Molecular Characterization of Screen-Detected Lesions (MCL) consortium, her research is focused on building tissue, pathology and imaging resources to assist in the better molecular definition of DCIS and defining who will recur with aggressive invasive cancer or not. The hope is to be able to stratify patients for either less treatment intervention or more at the earliest stages of disease, and to find potentially common drivers of aggressive disease across multiple disease types, as well as markers of indolent disease by looking at both tumor and stromal microenvironment biology.