Cheng Peng, ScD

Brigham And Women's Hospital

Academic Titles

Assistant Professor, Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Research Program Affiliation

Member, Cancer Epidemiology

Member, Breast Cancer

Research Abstract

I am an Assistant Professor in Medicine at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I am currently funded through an NIA K01 Award to study the intersection between breast cancer and cognitive aging, where I investigated the long-term associations of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment history with cognitive function and decline among older individuals. I integrated aspects of tumor biology into prospective longitudinal population studies to investigate how pre-diagnostic exposures, including those across the life-course, were related to tumor molecular features. I studied gene-environment interactions and showed that women with high germline genetic risk or high mammographic density may benefit more from increasing plasma carotenoids concentrations. We applied a novel multi-state modeling strategy and showed that higher pre-diagnostic circulating carotenoids concentrations were associated with a lower likelihood of transitioning from a cancer-free state to fatal breast cancer.