Associate Director for Shared Resources
Jay W. Fox, PhD
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 434.924.0050
As the UVA Comprehensive Cancer Center associate director for shared resources, Jay W. Fox, PhD, ensures that cancer center researchers are supported by high-quality, cost-effective, cancer-focused services and technologies.
He works closely with administrative and research program leadership to anticipate evolving needs and align shared resources with research priorities and supports maintenance and upgrades in collaboration with the associate director for research administration and strategic planning. He also leads the School of Medicine’s Office of Research Core Administration (ORCA) as director of research infrastructure and is a professor of microbiology, immunology, and cancer biology.
Under Dr. Fox’s leadership, the cancer center has supported the growing demand for advanced analytics, including establishment of a spatial biology service offering spatial transcriptomics, image analysis, proteomics, lipidomics, metabolomics, and integrated data analytics. In partnership with the associate director for training and education, he established Undergraduate Cancer Scholars in the Cores (USCORE), providing undergraduates with hands-on experience in cancer research technologies. As ORCA director, a role Dr. Fox has held for more than 35 years, he centralized School of Medicine shared resources under a unified management structure, introduced major infrastructure innovations, and guided strategic instrument acquisition and protocol development.
In his own research, Dr. Fox studies the role the extracellular matrix of the host (organisms and tissues that provide structure and support to the surrounding cell) in transformation, tumor development, invasion, and growth and the development of therapeutic interventions to disable these activities. His work focuses primarily on melanoma and breast cancer and on the molecular structure and breast cancer risk of women with dense breasts.
Dr. Fox founded the Mid-Atlantic Shared Resources Consortium, which expanded in partnership with the University of Maryland to span the East Coast and has grown to become the National Alliance of Cancer Center Shared Resources.
He earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry and philosophy from Monmouth College in Illinois and his PhD in biochemistry from Colorado State University. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in biochemistry and pharmacology at the University of Colorado.