A native of Los Angeles, CA, Stefani earned her BA in Biological Sciences with a Minor in Music from Dartmouth College and her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Southern California. After completing a research postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. Robert Cotter at Johns Hopkins, Stefani joined the Center for Biomarker Discovery and Translation at Johns Hopkins where she conducted mass spectrometry-based clinical proteomics research. She then completed a Clinical Chemistry postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins. At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Thomas is a member of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology's Division of Molecular Pathology and Genomics, and a faculty investigator at the Advanced Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (ARDL). She also serves as the Associate Medical Director of the M Health Fairview West Bank Laboratory. Dr. Thomas is a Graduate Faculty member of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics (MPaT); Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics; and Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology (MICaB). Research in the Thomas Lab focuses on applying mass spectrometry-based clinical proteomics methods for cancer biomarker development. The lab is pursuing answers to questions such as: Is there a protein signature that distinguishes cancer from benign or non-cancerous conditions? Can levels of specific proteins determine whether a patient will respond to a particular drug? Can biomarkers be reliably detected in non-invasively obtained biological specimens?
Specialty
Graduate Faculty - Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics (MPaT)
