Dr. Amend is a cancer researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Pienta at the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She has been active in cancer research since 2009 and earned her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis with her thesis work focused on the role of the bone microenvironment in skeletal metastasis. Dr. Amend takes an interdisciplinary approach to study the role of the tumor microenvironment in shaping disease progression. In particular, she applies ecological paradigms to cancer biology to gain insight of how and why cancer spreads from a primary tumor to form distant metastases. Dr. Amend was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Cancer Society and is the recipient of several young investigator awards.