David Bader

I am an oncology fellow in the Physician Scientist Training Program at Duke University. I aspire to lead a basic and translational laboratory aimed at understanding the relationship between sex hormones and antitumor immune responses. In pursuit of this goal, I have cultivated a broad background in molecular and cellular biology with expertise in nuclear hormone receptor signaling, oncogenesis, immunology, and cellular metabolism. During my PhD training at Baylor College of Medicine, I earned an individual NIH F30 award and spearheaded a highly multidisciplinary research program that yielded numerous peer-reviewed publications and various research accolades including the ‘Outstanding Graduate in Molecular Biology’ award and the inaugural Nature Metabolism Research Manuscript & Hero Image. Our efforts uncovered a unique, androgen-receptor-generated metabolic dependency in prostate cancer that can be leveraged for therapeutic benefit in lethal, castrate-resistant disease (Nature Metabolism, 2019).

I am completing a postdoctoral research and clinical fellowship in oncology under the scientific supervision of Dr. Donald McDonnell and Dr. Matthew Hirschey with clinical mentorship from Dr. Michael Morse and Dr. David Hsu. Accordingly, I am tailoring my clinical training to specialize in the treatment of gastrointestinal and hepatobiliary cancers. Our multidisciplinary team has experience in hormone receptor signaling, pharmacology, cellular metabolism, proteomics, computational analysis, and clinical trials. I am extending my expertise to examine the role of sex hormones in adaptive antitumor immunity in hepatocellular carcinoma. While advancing this project, I was recognized with Duke’s Robert Silber Memorial Research Award (2025) and I have successfully competed for internal and external funding with support from Duke (OPSD Tech Support 2023, DCI-YIA Pilot 2024), the NIH (NCI F32 CA298657 2025), and ASCO (Conquer Cancer YIA 2025). Together and with our DCI collaborators, we are fusing a broad array of expertise to accelerate scientific advancement with the near term of goal of understanding how androgens functionally modulate adaptive antitumor immunity and with the long-term goal of leveraging this knowledge to inform new and better treatments for people with cancer. I look forward to a future in which I expect to function as an independent, yet highly collaborative scientific investigator embedded within a seamlessly interconnected multi-disciplinary research environment incorporating basic, translational, and clinical research programs.