James Hicks, Ph.D., USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience

Research Professor, Biological Sciences

Dr. Hicks is a pioneer of single cell genomics and translational cancer research with a focus in breast and prostate cancer. He is focused on the development and implementation of high content single cell assays to understand the spatial and temporal evolution of cancer in the human body.  He is an experienced academic researcher and corporate entrepreneur with a long history of translating science into useful products having published over one hundred scientific papers and patents, as well as having started a number of companies.

His groundbreaking developments in single cell genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have enabled the routine whole genome analysis of individual cells that he initially applied to solid tumor biopsies. In 2012, he started collaborating with Dr. Peter Kuhn to utilize their combined technologies in the high density single cell analysis framework across all solid and liquid biopsies. This work is rapidly becoming the standard in research focused on the spatial and temporal evolution of cancer, and led Dr. Hicks to join the Michelson Center at USC in 2014.

His work at the Convergent Science Institute in Cancer (CSI-Cancer) will expand on the comprehensive liquid biopsy theme in order to understand a broad range of systemic diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, all of which suffer from similar challenges of poorly understand disease evolution under natural and therapeutic pressures.

Dr. Hicks is a geneticist who trained initially at the University of Oregon and built his career with research and faculty appointments at Cornell University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, as well as a broad range of industrial leadership positions. He is Professor (Research) of Biological Sciences in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

More information about James Hicks’s research.