Icahn school of medicine
New York, New York, United States
I have a PhD in Cancer Biology with a research focus on glioblastoma, the most lethal and common brain cancer. Additionally, I have extensive experience in evaluating therapeutic and PET diagnostic agents for multiple other solid tumors. I have been involved in brain cancer research for the past 10 years and committed to furthering our understanding of the biology of glioblastoma, by performing multidisciplinary research that incorporates novel biomedical technologies. As a doctoral student, I successfully evaluated efficacy of a loco-regionally delivered radiolabeled therapeutic targeting a critical glioblastoma-specific receptor, interleukin-13 receptor alpha 2 (IL13RA2) and contributed to the development of innovative technologies to increase drug access to tumors in glioblastoma patients, by enhancing blood-brain barrier permeability.
As a postdoctoral fellow, I am investigating the relationship between microenvironmental stress and tumor immunity in glioblastoma. I engineered spatial and temporal genetic reporters which can be stably integrated to lineage-trace individual cancer cells which respond to hypoxic stress. I then used these genetic labels to perform bioinformatic analysis to decipher critical genes within immune and tumor cells, involved in responding to microenvironmental stress using single-cell RNA sequencing and matched their expression to critical cellular events driving immune suppression during glioblastoma progression and treatment.
