Thesis Defense

* MD-PhD students

2022

Joshua Cho: August 2022
Sponsor: Dr. Ismael Santa-Maria Perez
Thesis Title: The role of microRNA-219 in Alzheimer’s Disease-related tau proteostasis and pathology

Jordan Kesner: August 2022
Sponsor: Dr. Xuebing Wu
Thesis Title: Noncoding translation mitigation

Ksenia Rybkenia: August 2022
Sponsor: Dr. Donna Farber
Thesis Title: Characterizing SARS-CoV-2-specific immune memory across tissues and age

Yiming Huang: July 2022
Sponsor: Dr. Harris Wang
Thesis Title: Towards new approaches for studying personalized gut microbiota and host-microbe interactions

Crystal Colon Ortiz: June 2022
Sponsor: Dr. Carol Troy
Thesis Title: Vascular-glial signaling in neurovascular injury

Charlotte Wayne: June 2022
Sponsor: Dr. Dritan Agalliu
Thesis Title: Roles of Th17 cytokines in microglial and neurovascular responses to recurrent intranasal Streptococcus pyogenes infection

Jiemin Sheng: May 2022
Sponsor: Dr. Alejandro Chavez
Thesis Title: The development and application of high-throughput tools for functional genomics

*Tolulope Akinade: January 2022
Sponsor: Dr. Kam Leong
Thesis Title: Design and application of cationic nanocarriers to inhibit chemotherapy-induced breast cancer metastasis and inflammation

*Jennifer Zagelbaum: January 2022
Sponsor: Dr. Jean Gautier
Thesis Title: ARP2/3- and resection-coupled genome reorganization into repair domains facilitates chromosome translocations

2021

*Yoon Jin Lee: December 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Angela Christiano
Thesis Title: Single-cell analysis of alopecia areata

Paul Dellorusso: December 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Emmanuel Passegue
Thesis Title: Autophagy and hematopoietic stem cell potential during aging

*Alfred von Krusenstiern: December 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Brent Stockwell
Thesis Title: Lipid on fire: identifying and targeting subcellular membranes that drive ferroptosis

*Samuel Resnick: December 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Alejandro Chavez
Thesis Title: Multiplexed high throughput screening identifies broadly-active rescuers of proteotoxicity

*Jordan Metz: December 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Peter Sims
Thesis Title: Systems-level approaches to understanding protein synthesis

Julie Yi: December 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Richard Vallee
Thesis Title: Characterization of pathogenic BicD2 mutations in vitro and in vivo

*Maya Poon: December 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Donna Farber
Thesis Title: Tissue-wide dynamics of human anti-viral immunity

Alan Chramiec: December 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic
Thesis Title: A novel human multi-tissue system for preclinical drug evaluation and recapitulation of metastasis

Felix Wu: December 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Molly Przeworski
Thesis Title: Scouring genomes and evolutionary trees for the origins of sex-biased germline mutation

Nicholas Giangreco: October 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Nicholas Tatonetti
Thesis Title: Mind the developmental gap: Identifying adverse drug effects across childhood to evaluate biological mechanisms from growth and development

*Aleksandar Obradovic: October 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Andrea Califano
Thesis Title: Discovering master regulators of single-cell transcriptional states in the tumor immune microenvironment to reveal immuno-therapeutic targets and synergistic treatments

Adrienne Cohen: October 2021
Sponsor: Dr. David Owens
Thesis Title: The role of Carabin in CD8+ T-cell-mediated anti-tumor immunity

Manuel Tamargo: October 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic
Thesis Title: Matured engineered human cardiac tissues to study autoimmune myocarditis

*Benjamin Hobson: September 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Peter Sims & Dr. David Sulzer
Thesis Title: Subcellular molecular profiling of midbrain dopamine neuron

Andrew Ressler: September 2021
Sponsor: Dr. David Goldstein
Thesis Title: Reading the disease leaves: Signals, signatures and synchrony in neurodevelopmental disorders

Elise Flynn: September 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Tuuli Lappalainen
Thesis Title: Genetic regulatory variant effects across tissues and individuals

Brianna Costabile: July 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Filippo Mancia
Thesis Title: Structural and functional characterization of the retinol-binding protein receptor STRA6

Lia Boyle: June 2021
Sponsor: Dr.Wendy Chung and Dr. Vincent Gennarino
Thesis Title: A precision medicine approach to understanding KIF1A associated neurological disorder

Sara Viragova: June 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Piero Dalerba
Thesis Title: Phenotypic dissection and therapeutic manipulation of cell differentiation programs in the salivary gland epithelium and human Adenoid Cystic Carcinomas

Micah Rapp: June 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Lawrence Shapiro and Dr. Bridget Carragher
Thesis Title: Visualizing cell surface interaction using cryogenic electron microscopy

Tyler Halpin-Haley: May 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Samuel Sternberg
Thesis Title: Structure and function of a transposon-encoded CRISPR-Cas system

Sunny Jones: May 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Andrea Califano
Thesis Title: Multi-omics precision oncology pipeline to elucidate mechanistic determinants of gastroesophageal tumor subtypes as candidate dependencies

*Elizabeth Ha: May 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Robert Bauer
Thesis Title: Adipocyte-specific Tribbles-1 regulates plasma adiponectin and lipoprotein metabolism in mice

Sreyan Chowdhury: May 2021
Sponsors: Dr. Tal Danino and Dr. Nick Arpaia
Thesis Title: Engineered bacteria for cancer immunotherapy

James Murithi: May 2021
Sponsor: Dr. David Fidock
Thesis Title: Dissecting the mechanisms of antiplastmodial resistance in Plasmodium falciparum

Tiffany Tate: February 2021
Sponsor: Dr. Cathy Mendelsohn
Thesis Title: Pparg drives luminal differentiation and luminal tumor formation in the urothelium

2020

*Bohao Liu: December 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic
Thesis Title: Leveraging the potential of human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes: From modeling congenital heart disease to treating myocardial infarction

Elizaveta Bashkirova: December 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Stavros Lomvardas
Thesis Title: Spatially determined olfactory receptor choice is regulated by NFI-dependent heterochromatin silencing and genomic compartmentalization

*Alyssa Klein: December 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Carol Prives
Thesis Title: A p53-independent role for MDM2/MDMX in cell cycle progression

Siying Chen: November 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Yufeng Shen
Thesis Title: Integration of functional genomic data in genetic analysis

Jared Sampson: October 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Lawrence Shapiro
Thesis Title: The pH-sensing mechanism of antibody recycling by the neonatal Fc receptor revealed using free energy perturbation calculations

*Katherine Luo: September 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Iva Greenwald
Thesis Title: Regulation of the LIN-12/notch core nuclear complex components in C. elegans reproductive development

Daniel Costantini: September 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Richard Axel
Thesis Title: Neuronal topography in a cortical circuit for innate odor valence

Thomas Blazejewski: September 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Harris Wang
Thesis Title: Generative models for synthetic biology

Pedro Baldera-Aguayo: July 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Virginia Cornish
Thesis Title: Engineering yeasts for in situ production of fungal tetracyclines

Gilman Donne: July 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Lawrence Shapiro
Thesis Title: Structural and biophysical studies of hair cell mechanotransduction proteins

*Daniel Paik: June 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Donna Farber
Thesis Title: Local T cell responses to heterosubtypic influenza challenge

*Steven Su: June 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Ellen Ezratty
Thesis Title: Characterization of primary cilia and Intraflagellar Transport 20 in the Epidermis

Jimin Park: May 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Harris Wang
Thesis Title: Systematic dissection of σ70 sequence diversity and function in bacteria

*Andrew Chen: April 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Raul Rabadan
Thesis Title: Spatial and genomic analysis of the glioblastoma tumor microenvironment

Hannah Levitin: April 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Peter Sims
Thesis Title: Biological inference from Single Cell RNA-Sequencing

*Ryan Dhindsa: March 2020
Sponsor: Dr. David Goldstein
Thesis Title: Deciphering gene dysregulation in disease through population and functional genomics

*Phyllis Thangaraj: January 2020
Sponsor: Dr. Nicholas Tatonetti
Thesis Title: Electronic health record-derived phenotyping models to improve genomic research in stroke