Christensen Molecular Epidemiology Lab

Principal Investigator

Brock C. Christensen, Ph.D.

Professor of Epidemiology, Molecular and Systems Biology, Community and Family Medicine

Associate Director for Strategic Initiatives | Dartmouth Cancer Center

Dr. Christensen received his B.S. from the University of Wisconsin Madison in Medical Microbiology & Immunology and French, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Biological Sciences in Public Health. He trained as a postdoctoral research associate in molecular epidemiology of cancer at Brown University in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Dr. Christensen joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 2011.

May 2026

Published in npj Systems Biology and Applications and authored by research assistant Jeffrey Hage: A new statistical method for recovering count information from proportional data by applying trained priors, named Mahalanobis Count Inference (MCI). The method is generally applicable to multiple kinds of biological measurements (e.g. single-cell transcriptomics).

Inferring absolute counts from proportions by constraining multivariate normal distributions

November 2024

QBS Ph.D. student Ze Zhang, published an application of detailed DNA-based immune profiling in head and neck cancer immunotherapy response in npj Precision Oncology.

Methylation cytometric pretreatment blood immune profiles with tumor mutation burden as prognostic indicators for survival outcomes in head and neck cancer patients on anti-PD-1 therapy

June 2024

Congratulations to graduating Dartmouth senior Samuel Reynolds who contributed two lead-author manuscripts related to his independent study and senior honors thesis work in the lab on DNA based cell typing with methylation cytometry.

Tumor microenvironment deconvolution identifies cell-type-independent aberrant DNA methylation and gene expression in prostate cancer

Detailed immune profiling in pediatric Crohn's disease using methylation cytometry

April 2024

Ph.D. student Sarah Lee published back-to-back articles in Nature Communications on single-cell gene expression and epigenetic modifications in pediatric central nervous system tumors.

Identifying tumor type and cell type-specific gene expression alterations in pediatric central nervous system tumors

Associations in cell type-specific hydroxymethylation and transcriptional alterations of pediatric central nervous system tumors

February 2022

Dr. Lucas Salas M.D., MPH, Ph.D., and QBS Ph.D. student Ze Zhang, published their novel immune-profiling method using DNA from blood in Nature Communications. Their work is picked up by the online news services GenomeWeb and Medical Xpress.

Enhanced cell deconvolution of peripheral blood using DNA methylation for high-resolution immune profiling