Caitlin Mills

Dr. Caitlin Mills received her PhD in Medical Physics from McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada) and is currently a Lecturer on Systems Biology and the Director of Preclinical Pharmacology in the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology (LSP) at Harvard Medical School. Upon joining the LSP, Dr. Mills worked on identifying vulnerabilities to targeted therapies in triple negative breast (TNBC) and ovarian cancers. She managed an extensive breast and ovarian cancer cell line profiling effort measuring phenotypic responses (growth inhibition, cell cycle arrest, and death) to kinase inhibitors. Through that work, Dr. Mills and team optimized ‘dye drop’ methods to maximize phenotypic insight from microscopy-based dose response assays and worked to automate and improve the reproducibility of measurements of cellular responses to small molecule perturbagens. Repeated observations of unexpected phenotypic responses to targeted kinase inhibitors led to her current interest in polypharmacology and its