In her roles as the Associate Director (AD) of Cancer Control and Population Sciences for The Houston Methodist Dr. Mary and Ron Neal Cancer Center (HMNCC), and Scientist within the Houston Methodist Research Institute, Dr. Cullen is responsible for the development of an emerging Cancer Prevention and Control (CPC) Program, in alignment with the HMNCC Strategic Plan. This growing CPC Program will help foster inter-programmatic team-science efforts across HMNCC Programs and address the catchment area cancer burden, with a goal of ameliorating the long-standing excess cancer burden among medically under-served and vulnerable populations in our region.

Prior to joining the HMNCC in March 2024, she served as the AD of Cancer Population Sciences at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, as well as a Professor in the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine, and held the James T. Pardee – Carl A. Gerstacker Professorship in Cancer Research. 

Among her funding highlights, Dr. Cullen has had (i) two DOD Congressionally-directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) Health Disparities Awards as a Principal Investigator (PI), (ii) an NIH P20 SPORE grant in Cancer Health Disparities as a co-PI; (iii) a U01 addressing medical interactions of immunotherapy and cannabis use on multiple myeloma patients (co-PI) and (iv) a 5-year, $2 million Merck Foundation national alliance award to improve equity in cancer care delivery (co-PI/Lead PI). 
Dr. Cullen has extensive experience in mentoring medical residents, post-doctoral researchers in basic, clinical and population sciences, as well as undergraduate/Masters/PhD students.  While at Case Western Reserve University, she taught Statistics in Public Health (2021-2024), a required “core” course for the Master of Public Health students. 
Dr. Cullen has been a dedicated patient advocate on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC meeting with Congressional representatives to champion bipartisan sponsorship for cancer-focused legislation, including the “Childhood Cancer Survivorship, Treatment, Access, and Research” (STAR) Act (Public Law 115-180).  She has offered testimony at Ohio’s State Capitol in support of the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) cancer biomarker testing bill and she was an invited speaker for a jointly sponsored ACS-Institute of Medicine (IoM) workshop entitled “Comprehensive Cancer Care for Children and Their Families”, aimed at improving palliative care for childhood cancer patients and their families.  Currently, she serves on the Board of Directors for “PREP4Gold”, an organization that is uniquely focused on the science of prevention and early detection of pediatric cancers.

Dr. Cullen’s long-standing research focus has been on the identification and validation of biomarkers and assay panels to forecast adverse prostate cancer outcomes, with a primary focus on disparities in outcomes and the interplay of biological and social determinants of health (SDOH) that contribute to cancer disparities for a wide range of malignancies. In her leadership roles within the Department of Defense’s (DOD) “Center for Prostate Disease Research”, she was responsible for a clinical data repository that grew to include over 30,000 male military health care beneficiaries—all biopsied for prostate cancer—with linkage to a large biospecimen repository. Using these resources, she leveraged these “real world” data, with long-term patient follow-up, to inform public health approaches for cancer prevention, treatment, and survivorship. As part of these data collection efforts, she initiated longitudinal data collection of patient-reported outcomes to examine repeated-measures, quality-of-life trajectories for cancer survivors. She also fostered multi-institutional collaborative partnerships with academia and industry, including her lead role in the validation study of the OncotypeDx® Genomic Prostate Score (GPS), which is now included in the NCCN treatment guidelines for low-risk prostate cancer patients.