John Hickey

John Hickey, Ph.D., Co-Investigator, is an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Department of Biomedical Engineering. He has spearheaded efforts to publish a technique and protocol for CODEX multiplexed imaging, to develop a multiplexed imaging primer, to optimize data normalization and clustering, and to co-develop a deep learning algorithm (STELLAR) for cell-type label transfer in spatial single-cell data. Dr. Hickey’s prior work focuses on identifying tissue structures from the bottom up–i.e., starting from individual proteins expressed (fluorescence), quantifying at the single cell level, classifying cell type, and using cell neighborhood approaches to characterize cell type structures from these cell types and spatial coordinates. He has led efforts to create spatially resolved maps of healthy tissue, cancer, immunotherapies, and biomaterials in both murine and human samples, in consortia (e.g., HuBMAP). 

Dr. Hickey’s laboratory sits at the interface of engineering and immunology, using and developing systems immunology tools to investigate tissue structure in situ. He has received several awards for his work, including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the ARCS Scholarship, the Siebel Scholarship, the NCI Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship. Beyond multiscale spatial-omic computational analyses, Dr. Hickey employs multiplexed imaging and computational techniques to characterize spatial cellular responses related to the effectiveness of anti-cancer cell therapies or biomaterials and has integrated multiplexed imaging data with multiscale agent-based models of the immune response within the spatial tumor microenvironment. He uses this expertise to oversee the MISM Research Project 2 efforts, including conjugating and validating antibodies for the CODEX antibody panel and performing CODEX multiplexed imaging on TMAs. Dr. Hickey also supervises graduate students who will perform detailed spatial bioinformatics analysis and develop a multiscale agent-based model. He will also coordinate communication with the larger MISM modeling group surrounding the integration of additional data from other Research Projects.