Annette Molinaro, PhD

Dr. Molinaro's expertise centers on developing and applying statistical and machine learning methods in cancer research, spanning basic, translational, and clinical studies.

As Director of the Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics in the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery and Biostatistics Core Director for the UCSF Brain Tumor SPORE and Program Project, she provides guidance on study design, statistical modeling, and data analysis across Brain Tumor Center projects in imaging, genetics, genomics, epidemiology, and immunology. She is Co-Principal Investigator of Project 1 of the Brain SPORE. Her work focuses on predicting clinical outcomes from high-dimensional data and on designing clinical trials for adults and children with brain tumors, including novel designs that use external control data.

Dr. Molinaro is a member of the Scientific Leadership and the lead statistician for the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC), where she has designed and analyzed more than 40 pediatric brain tumor trials. She is an elected member of the National Cancer Institute's Brain Malignancies Steering Committee, serves on independent data monitoring committees and steering committees for industry and academic trials, is a regular participant in National Brain Tumor Society Research Roundtables, and helps plan the Clinical Trial Design and Protocol Development Workshop at the annual Society for Neuro-Oncology meeting. She served on the SNO Board of Directors from 2017 to 2020. She is Associate Editor of Neuro-Oncology Practice, where she founded the "Statistics for the Practicing Clinician" series, and serves on the editorial boards of Neuro-Oncology and Neuro-Oncology Advances.

Dr. Molinaro has authored more than 270 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, and freely available software packages for high-dimensional data analysis, including partDSA. She designed and oversees the Brain Tumor Center Database (BTCDB), a HIPAA-compliant platform that links clinical, pathology, imaging, and genomic data across Brain Tumor Center projects.