I am a physician-scientist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where I spearhead projects in immune-oncology, cfDNA bio-markers, and functional genomics. I am passionate about translational research to discover therapies that help patients with cancer live longer and live better.

My undergraduate training was in Applied Physics at Caltech where I developed an interest in applying quantitative mathematical modeling to biology and medicine. This led to an MD/PhD under the late Dr. Tony Pawson at the University of Toronto where I took a comprehensive, systems biology approach to study kinase networks that modulate sensitivity to TRAIL-mediated apoptosis in colon cancer.

In radiation oncology residency, I had been struck by how some patients with gliomas respond well, while others recur, in response to the same adjuvant therapy. I initiated and completed a study that described a transcription factor prognostic signature in patients with oligodendroglioma treated with adjuvant radiation, which would represent possible resistance mechanisms and signal the need for treatment intensification.

Continuing in glioma genomics, at the Dana-Farber, I lead an interdisciplinary team to integrate functional screens with patient genomics. Leveraging genome-wide CRISPR screens in over 800 cancer cell-lines, we discovered that adult and pediatric gliomas and neuroblastomas which have low VRK2 expression are dependent on its paralog VRK1.

As a physician-scientist, I believe developing future cancer therapies will continue to involve integrating functional approaches with patient-derived clinical genomics to discover bio-marker driven targets such as VRK1.