The Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences is excited to have Dr. Heide Ford share her work. Here is a brief bio on Dr. Ford.

Dr. Heide Ford is a Tenured Professor and the CU Medicine Endowed Chair in the Department of Pharmacology at The University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus.  She received an undergraduate degree in Biology, with a minor in Chemistry, from the State University of New York at Geneseo, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biochemistry from the University of Rochester, both in upstate New York.  After completing her postdoctoral fellowship under the mentorship of Arthur Pardee at The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School in Boston, Dr. Ford joined the University of Colorado School of Medicine in 2001.  Since then, she has been running a continuously NCI/NIH-funded laboratory that focuses on the role of developmental regulators, particularly the Six1/Eya transcriptional complex, in breast, brain, and pediatric tumorigenesis and metastasis.  Her work spans diverse areas, from understanding the parallels between normal development and tumor progression, with a focus on the epithelial to mesenchymal transition, tumor plasticity (both at the transcriptional and mRNA translational level), and tumor-host interactions, to more translational, with a focus on targeting transcription factors and their regulators as potential anti-metastasis agents.  To date, she has published 100 peer reviewed primary research articles and reviews, the vast majority related to tumor progression and metastasis.  Dr. Ford plays an active leadership role nationally/internationally, through chairing study sections (NCI), international conferences (Gordon Conference), and through serving on numerous editorial boards including past services as senior/deputy editor for Molecular Cancer Research and Breast Cancer Research.  Dr. Ford has mentored many undergraduate and graduate students, as well postdoctoral fellows, and was the Director of The Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program at The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus from 2010-2017.  She received The Dean’s Mentoring Award in 2010 and 2021, and the Pharmacology Teaching/Mentoring award in 2013, 2016, and 2020, as well as the Pharmacology Faculty Excellence in Research Award in 2018, and thus is dedicated to developing the careers of young scientists.  Currently she is the Associate Director for Basic Research for the NCI-designated University of Colorado Comprehensive Cancer Center, and The Chair of the Department of Pharmacology.