USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center

An NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center

Peggy Farnham, PhD

Associate Director, Basic Research
Peggy.Farnham@med.usc.edu

Dr. Farnham is the Associate Director of Basic Sciences at USC Norris. Dr. Farnham received her bachelor’s degree from Rice University, her Ph.D. from Yale University, and performed her post-doctoral training at Stanford University.

Dr. Farnham has been a leader in the genome-wide study of mammalian transcription factors in normal and cancer cells. Her lab was the first to develop ChIP protocols for mammalian cells and for the study of tumors from cancer patients, focusing on key cancer pathways regulated by E2F, MYC, and beta-catenin. Dr. Farnham was a founding member of the ENCODE Consortium, whose goal was to map all the functional elements in the human genome, mainly focusing on cancer cell lines.

She was also a member of the NIH Roadmap Epigenome Mapping Consortium, which published epigenomes for ~100 normal cell types. Current projects in her lab are focused on oncogenic transcription factors, the identification and characterization of cancer-associated enhancers, and epigenomic regulation of cancer cell phenotypes. Dr. Farnham is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was awarded the prestigious Herbert A. Sober Lectureship from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which recognizes outstanding biochemical and molecular biological research, with particular emphasis on the development of methods and techniques to aid in research.