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Supporting Hematology’s Future: The 2021 ASH Scholar Award Free

December 16, 2021

The ASH Scholar Award is the Society’s longest-standing award program and one of the most highly regarded. For almost three decades, ASH has supported hundreds of fellows and junior faculty in both basic and clinical/translational research by providing partial salary or other support during the critical period between completion of training and the establishment of one’s independent career. The awards, in the amount of $100,000 for fellows and $150,000 for junior faculty over a two- to three-year period, are made possible through grants from the corporate community, individual donors, foundations, and funds committed by the Society. (To learn more about the ASH Scholar Award program and other early career investigator awards and training programs, please visit www.hematology.org/awards.)

Jeevisha Bajaj, PhD

Dr. Bajaj is an assistant professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Her laboratory focuses on defining the role of cancer microenvironment interactions in the progression of aggressive myeloid leukemias. She did her doctoral studies at the National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, where she identified and characterized human cervical cancer stem cell populations. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, she worked on determining the function of cell-surface signals, as well as RNA-binding proteins, in myeloid leukemias. Her work established a critical role for CD98- and Tspan3-mediated adhesive interactions of leukemia cells with their microenvironment in cancer initiation and propagation. To comprehensively define the genetic dependencies of aggressive myeloid diseases in their physiological environment, she recently carried out a genomewide in vivo CRISPR screen using the cancer propagating leukemia stem cells. This study led to the discovery of several novel genes and programs essential for myeloid leukemia growth, including the double stranded RNA-binding protein Staufen 2. The ASH Scholar Award will support Dr. Bajaj’s laboratory in determining mechanisms by which novel cell surface signals identified from the CRISPR screen, that can integrate signals from the niche, impact the growth and progression of aggressive myeloid leukemias.

Roger Belizaire, MD, PhD

Dr. Belizaire is an instructor in pathology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, where he studies oncogenic signaling in myeloid neoplasms. He completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton University and earned his MD/PhD from the Washington University School of Medicine. He completed clinical pathology residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital followed by fellowship training in transfusion medicine at Harvard Medical School. During his postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Benjamin Ebert, he studied the oncogenic mechanisms of CBL E3 ubiquitin ligase mutations in myeloid malignancies. Using a proteomics-based approached, he characterized the phosphoproteome and CBL interactome in CBL-mutant cells. He described hyperactivation of a CBL-LYN-PI3K signaling axis and demonstrated the antiproliferative efficacy of LYN inhibition by dasatinib in patient-derived xenograft models of CBL-mutant chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML). For his Scholar Award, Dr. Belizaire will investigate the role of SYK in the oncogenic function of mutant CBL. In addition, he will explore mechanisms of dasatinib resistance and evaluate novel combination therapies in models CBL-mutant myeloid malignancies. The Scholar Award will provide Dr. Belizaire with the protected time and mentorship essential for his success as he builds his independent research program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Shannon Buckley, PhD

Dr. Buckley is an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Anatomy, at University of Nebraska Medical Center, where she studies regulation of normal and malignant hematopoiesis by ubiquitin proteosome system. She obtained her PhD from the University of Minnesota. During her PhD, she studied the role of the microenvironment in regulating hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) self-renewal and maintenance in the lab Dr. Catherine Verfailllie. After receiving her PhD, she moved to NYU School of Medicine to join the lab of Dr. Iannis Aifantis. As a postdoctoral fellow she identified novel members of the ubiquitin proteasome system that play key roles in pluripotency, self-renewal, differentiation, and malignant transformation. The goal of her independent lab is to utilize genomic and proteomic approaches in normal and malignant hematopoietic cells to study molecular mechanisms regulating hematopoietic cell fate decisions. Her work has demonstrated a key role of ubiquitin E3 ligase, UBR5, which is mutated in approximately 18 percent of mantle cell lymphoma patients in maturation and activation of B cells, and her future goal is to decipher the molecular mechanisms of UBR5 in hematopoietic malignancies. The Scholar Award will enable her to make new insights into mechanisms underlying hematopoietic specification and to identify therapeutic targets in hematopoietic malignancies for drug discovery.

Shruti Chaturvedi, MBBS, MS

Dr. Chaturvedi is an assistant professor of hematology at Johns Hopkins University where she specializes in thrombotic microangiopathies. She earned her medical degree from the University of Delhi, India, and completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic where she trained with Dr. Keith McCrae. She subsequently completed a fellowship in hematology/oncology from Vanderbilt University where she studied sickle cell disease (SCD) under Dr. Michael DeBaun. At Johns Hopkins, she works with Dr. Robert Brodsky on the role of complement antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). She presented their work establishing the role of complement activation in APS and catastrophic APS at the 2019 ASH Annual Meeting Plenary Scientific Session, and this has established the rationale for trials of complement inhibition for catastrophic APS. Dr. Chaturvedi’s lab also studies the long-term sequelae of thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP). Her studies revealed that TTP survivors are at high risk of stroke associated with low ADAMTS13 activity in clinical remission. For her Scholar Award project, she will prospectively evaluate whether silent cerebral infarction during TTP remission leads to cognitive impairment and future stroke, and its impact on quality of life. She will also evaluate the role of remission ADAMTS13 as a biomarker for neurovascular injury in TTP survivors. She is honored to receive the Scholar Award, which will provide critical support to establish her independent research career.

Satheesh Chonat, MD

Dr. Chonat is a physician-scientist and assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. After graduating from medical school in India, he trained in pediatric medicine at Cambridge University, England, and Michigan State University. During his fellowship training in hematology and oncology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, under the guidance of Dr. Theodosia Kalfa, his work helped identify the role of NADPH oxidases in cardiac pathology in a mouse model of SC. Additionally, he characterized the biochemical, rheological, and genomic correlation of patient phenotypes with red blood cell (RBC) membrane disorders. Under the guidance of Drs. Sean Stowell and Clinton Joiner, Dr. Chonat’s lab at Emory University now focuses on leveraging pre-clinical animal models and patient samples to explore the cellular mechanics and effects of complement dysregulation in SCD, with the goal of translating laboratory research to the bedside. His work has so far identified potential mechanisms as to why some patients and mice with SCD may have an increased tendency to undergo hyperhemolysis and acute organ injury. In the clinic, he specializes in caring for patients with RBC disorders, hemolytic anemias, and thrombotic microangiopathies. Dr. Chonat is honored to have been chosen to receive the ASH Scholar Award, which will allow him to further his research and establish himself as an independent investigator.

Ghadeer Dawwas, PhD, MSc, MBA

Dr. Dawwas is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Dawwas earned her degree in pharmacy from the University of Jordan and an MBA from Stratford University. She earned a masters and PhD in pharmacoepidemiology from the University of Florida. Dr. Dawwas is a pharmacoepidemiologist with a longstanding interest in improving venous thromboembolism (VTE) prevention and treatment. Her ASH grant goal is to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of direct oral anticoagulants and warfarin in stroke patients — a timely and critical topic given the rise in the incidence of VTE following stroke. Recently, she received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) K99/R00 award for her work assessing the role of anticoagulants for patients with VTE prevention in inflammatory bowel disease. Dr. Dawwas’s work received prestigious awards from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research, and the American Association of University Women.

Han Dong, PhD

Dr. Han Dong is currently an instructor in cancer immunology and virology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. She has a lifelong interest in the mechanisms of human disease and is committed to becoming an independent investigator in the field of tumor immunology and immunotherapy, an area of cancer biology desperately in need of deeper mechanistic understanding. In pursuit of this goal, she was trained as an immunologist at the University of Virginia with Dr. Timothy Bullock, whose lab focuses on pathways to enhance T-cell function in tumors. she then joined Dr. Laurie Glimcher’s laboratory for postdoctoral training, with the first research project investigating how endoplasmic reticulum stress responses affect the antiviral and antitumor function of specific innate immune cell populations, including natural killer (NK) cells (Dong et al., Nature Immunology, 2019). The follow-up project is ongoing with the goal of identifying the role of IRE1-mediated endoplasmic reticulum stress pathway in NK cell immunological memory and arming NK cells accordingly to improve current adoptive immunotherapies. Moving forward, further exploration in NK cell- and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) NK cell–mediated immunotherapies to treat acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is one of her major directions.

Yimeng Gao, PhD

Dr. Yimeng Gao is a postdoctoral associate at Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center, Yale University School of Medicine. He obtained his PhD in cell biology in 2017 from Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. During his PhD study, Dr. Gao focused on regulation of stem cell fate determination, awakening his interest for the role of RNA binding proteins in HSC function and leukemogenesis. He joined the laboratory of Dr. Stephanie Halene in the Section of Hematology at Yale University and was awarded a prestigious Brown-Coxe postdoctoral fellowship to study the role of the RNA N6-methyladenosine (m6A) methylase METTL3 in hematopoietic development. Modifying mice generated in the Flavell laboratory to achieve deletion of Mettl3 specifically in HSCs, he discovered that m6A modification of mRNAs prevents formation of double-strand RNA (dsRNA) and activation of an aberrant innate immune response in HSC and progenitor cells. With the support of the ASH Scholar Award, Dr. Gao will further explore the identity and consequences of m6A depleted dsRNAs during hematopoiesis and seek to exploit their detrimental effects on cellular function in the treatment of myeloid malignancies.

Lisa Giulino Roth, MD

Lisa Giulino Roth is an associate professor of pediatrics and the Director of Pediatric Oncology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work focuses on identifying novel therapies for children, adolescents, and young adults with lymphoma. Dr. Roth received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University and her MD from New York University. She completed her pediatric residency at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell followed by a fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at the combined program of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. During her fellowship, Dr. Roth joined the lab of Dr. Ethel Cesarman to study the biology of lymphomas associated with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). Her work identified structural alterations in the tumor suppressor TNFAIP3 in HIV-related lymphomas and described the functional relationship between these alterations and the expression of the EBV viral protein LMP. Dr. Roth then joined the faculty at Weill Cornell in the department of pediatrics. Her laboratory work has recently focused on epigenetic modulation of EBV-associated lymphomas under the joint mentorship of Dr. Ethel Cesarman and Dr. Ari Melnick.

Marlise “Nany” Guerrero-Schimpf, PhD

Dr. Guerrero-Schimpf is a postdoctoral fellow at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, where she studies the role of epigenetic abnormalities in AML and their potential for the development of novel therapeutic strategies. She obtained her PhD in biological sciences from the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Argentina. During that time, her research focused on studying developmental reprogramming of the female reproductive tract as a consequence of exposure to pesticides and its implications for reproductive disorders. After receiving her PhD, she moved to Miami to join Dr. Ken Figueroa’s lab. As a postdoctoral scientist she is interested in elucidating how loss of recurrently hypermethylated genes in AML contributes to leukemogenesis and how this may be harnessed for the development of novel targeted therapies. Particularly, she studies the role of PDZD2 in normal and malignant hematopoiesis. Her findings revealed that PDZD2 functions as tumor suppressor in AML, inducing growth inhibition in a wide variety of AMLs, irrespective of their molecular and cytogenetic subtypes. Dr Guerrero-Schimpf is committed to a career in basic/translational cancer research. The Scholar Award will provide her with critical support to accomplish her career goals while making substantial contributions in hematology research.

Franco Izzo, PhD

Dr. Franco Izzo is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center whose work focuses in studying both normal and malignant hematopoiesis. He completed his PhD at the University of Buenos Aires and at the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine. During this period, he received extensive training in molecular biology and oncology. In 2016, he moved to New York and joined Dr. Dan Landau’s laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center. His current research focuses in understanding the impact of somatic mutations driving clonal expansions in clonal hematopoiesis and myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs). By applying and developing single cell sequencing technologies, including single cell multi-omics, he aims to understand the impact of mutations in epigenetic modifiers on cell differentiation and cellular heterogeneity. His findings revealed how stochastic changes in DNA methylation driven by mutations in the epigenetic modifiers TET2 and DNMT3A translate into deterministic differentiation skews in clonal hematopoiesis. The Scholar Award will enable him to develop and apply novel methods to simultaneously capture genotypes and epiphenotypes in human samples, and to chart critical epigenetic disruptions in clonal hematopoiesis and MPNs.

Courtney Jones, PhD

Dr. Jones is a scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and assistant professor in the department of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Jones received her doctorate from New York University in 2014 studying mechanisms of therapy resistance in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia in the laboratory of Dr. William Carroll. She continued her training as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Craig Jordan at the University of Colorado where she studied metabolic properties of leukemic stem cells (LSCs). Dr. Jones worked closely with an excellent team of clinician scientists, stem cell biologists, and biochemists to identify and characterize targetable metabolic properties unique to LSCs. Dr. Jones and colleagues demonstrated that LSCs rely on amino acid metabolism for oxidative phosphorylation and that targeting amino acid biology can effectively kill LSCs in patients with AML. Furthermore, she characterized changes in LSC metabolic properties that occur during disease progression between diagnosis and relapse. For her Scholar Award project Dr. Jones’s lab is interrogating the role of sirtuin3 in regulating LSC mitochondrial metabolism. She is honored to receive an ASH Scholar Award as this award has already and will continue to help foster new collaborations and establish her independent laboratory.

Casey Katerndahl, PhD

Dr. Katerndahl is an instructor at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 from the University of Minnesota, where he worked in Dr. Michael Farrar’s lab studying the role of the transcription factor STAT5 in B cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. In 2017, he joined Dr. Timothy Ley’s lab at Washington University as a postdoctoral research scholar. During his postdoctoral work, Dr. Katerndahl used both CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing and retroviral addback approaches to show that Gata2 acts as a tumor suppressor in AML. Conversely, he showed that the AML-associated mutation Gata2R362G reduced the tumor suppressor function of Gata2. Currently, Dr. Katerndahl aims to identify the molecular mechanisms by which GATA2 regulates AML pathogenesis.

Eugene Khandros, MD, PhD

Dr. Khandros is an instructor in pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and an attending physician in the Division of Hematology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He received a BA in biochemistry from Columbia University and earned his MD and PhD at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His graduate work in the laboratory of Dr. Mitchell J. Weiss focused on hemoglobin assembly and detoxification pathways in β-thalassemia. Dr. Khandros subsequently completed pediatrics residency at the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York at Columbia University and pediatric hematology-oncology fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Gerd A. Blobel has focused on the heterogeneity of fetal hemoglobin expression in adult erythroid cells. His ASH Scholar Award project will be to study the epigenetic mechanisms of pharmacologic fetal hemoglobin inducers and to characterize novel regulators of fetal hemoglobin as therapeutic targets in hemoglobinopathies. His work has been previously funded by an ASH Research Training Award for Fellows and is funded currently by the ASH Scholar Award and an NIH National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) K08 award. His clinical focus is on RBC disorders and hemoglobinopathies.

Eboni Lance, MD, PhD

Dr. Eboni Lance is the Associate Director of the Neurology and Neurogenetics Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute, neurologist and Medical Director of the Sickle Cell Neurodevelopmental Clinic, and an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology and Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Lance received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and received her medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina. She did residency in general pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and additional specialized residency training in neurodevelopmental disabilities at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. She received additional research training at Kennedy Krieger Institute/Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and has a PhD in clinical investigation from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Lance is board certified in general pediatrics, neurology with a special qualification in child neurology, and neurodevelopmental disabilities. Dr. Lance’s research interest is in children with SCD and neurodevelopmental issues such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, intellectual disability, and learning disabilities. Her current studies involve ways to predict brain injury in preschool and school age children with SCD using magnetic resonance imaging techniques, cognitive testing, and protein markers of brain injury.

Stanley Lee, PhD

Dr. Lee is an assistant professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He received his graduate degree at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, followed by postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Dr. Lee’s laboratory focuses on defining the molecular basis of blood cell production and how its dysregulation can lead to hematologic disorders such as age-related clonal hematopoiesis, myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and AML. He is interested in understanding the role of post-transcriptional regulators including RNA splicing factors and helicases in the pathogenesis of myeloid leukemias. One of his long-term goals is to translate basic research findings into new therapies for patients with leukemia. Dr. Lee is honored to receive the prestigious ASH Scholar Award, which provides him with critical support as he establishes his independent research program as an early-stage investigator.

 

Richard J. Lin, MD, PhD

Dr. Lin is an assistant member at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center specializing in caring for patients with hematologic malignancies requiring transplantation and cellular immunotherapy. A native of China, Dr. Lin completed graduate and research work on the molecular pathogenesis and targeted therapy of acute promyelocytic leukemia with Dr. Ronald Evans at the Salk Institute. He subsequently earned an MD from Harvard Medical School and completed postgraduate training at University of Chicago Medicine and New York University Langone Health. Dr. Lin joined Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2017 as an advanced bone marrow transplantation (BMT) fellow, and conducted clinical translational research on risk stratification and management of older, vulnerable patients with lymphoma with Dr. Hamlin and in hematopoietic transplantation with Dr. Giralt. For this project, Dr. Lin plan to prospectively enroll older patients receiving commercial CAR T-cell (CAR-T) therapy and conduct longitudinal, comprehensive geriatric assessment and analyze aging-related, senescence-associated biomarkers. The hypothesis is that geriatric impairment and aging biomarkers could predict post-CAR-T toxicities thus providing potential targets for intervention. Dr. Lin is honored to receive this award and hope to advance his career goal of combining cell-based, immunotherapy and targeted therapy to improve outcomes for older patients with hematologic malignancies.

Rui Lu, PhD

Dr. Lu is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology and Oncology. He obtained his PhD at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China, where he studied stem cell biology and gene regulation. In 2012, he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and joined Dr. Greg Wang’s laboratory to investigate epigenetic regulations in AML (Cancer Cell 2016, Nature 2018, Cancer Research 2019). The current research in Dr. Lu’s laboratory aims to identify and characterize the critical transcriptional and epigenetic machinery required for leukemia initiation, progression, and/or drug resistance. He carries out both candidate and screening approaches to identify important targets, followed by rigorous characterization at biochemical, genomic, cellular, and whole-animal levels (eLife 2020, Blood Advances 2021). His career goal is to become a leading independent investigator in this research area to aid in developing mechanism-based and targeted therapeutic approaches for improved treatment of human leukemia. Dr. Lu is honored to receive the prestigious ASH Scholar Award, which will provide him with tremendous support to continue his current project and to realize his long-term goals.

Scott E. Millman, MD, PhD

Dr. Millman is an instructor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, specializing in the care of patients with AML and MDS. He completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University and earned both an MD and a PhD in Molecular Oncology and Immunology from the New York University School of Medicine, where he identified new targets for therapeutic intervention in multiple myeloma and B-cell lymphomas. He then completed an internal medicine residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital, followed by a hematology/oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Throughout his fellowship and into his appointment as a junior faculty member, his research, conducted within the laboratory or Dr. Scott Lowe, has focused on the use of functional genetic and genomic approaches to identify metabolic vulnerabilities in AML. There, he collaborated on studies identifying the vitamin B6 pathway as a pharmacologically actionable dependency in blood cancers and has focused on establishing preclinical models for target validation. Dr. Millman is grateful for the support provided by the ASH Scholar Award, with which he will further his efforts in the laboratory to identify and selectively target key regulators of cellular metabolism in chemotherapy-refractory leukemias including p53-mutant and complex karyotype AML.

Coraline Mlynarczyk, PhD

Dr. Mlynarczyk is a research associate at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, where she studies immune and metabolic deregulations in germinal center-derived B cell lymphomas. She obtained her PhD at the Paris Diderot University in France, where she specialized in the p53 tumor suppressor pathway and identified cellular stress conditions that can be manipulated to increase tumor sensitivity to chemotherapies. As part of Dr. Melnick’s laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine, she further developed her interests in understanding the mechanisms that govern malignant transformation and treatment resistance in the context of B cell lymphomas. She currently focuses on a gene called BTG1, which is recurrently and exclusively mutated in B-cell lymphomas and associates with poor clinical outcomes in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). She has uncovered a novel transformation mechanism, through which BTG1 mutations endow germinal center B cells with a strong metabolic advantage that leads to the accelerated development of aggressive lymphomas. Dr. Mlynarczyk will now determine how BTG1 mutations function molecularly and which metabolic dependencies they impose, to help design novel therapeutic strategies for clinically unfavorable DLBCLs. She is grateful for the ASH Scholar Award, which will support her transition to an independent position in lymphoma research.

Samuel Ng, MD, PhD

Dr. Ng completed his MD/PhD, at Harvard Medical School where he studied gene regulation in early lymphocyte development with Katia Georgopoulos. He proceeded to residency training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Hematology/Oncology fellowship training in the Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Center program where he began work with David Weinstock to study the molecular mechanisms of recurrent mutations and genetic vulnerabilities in peripheral T-cell lymphomas. During his postdoc, Dr. Ng has demonstrated with others that expression of RHOA G17V in combination with TET2 loss-of-function mutations drive T-cell transformation in mouse models. Dr. Ng’s work has also led to identification of genetic vulnerabilities enriched in T-cell Lymphoma models, serving as a possible basis for identifying new therapeutic approaches in these diseases. His ASH Scholar project, targeted at understanding the basis of BATF3 and IRF4 dependence in multiple subtypes of T-cell lymphoma models while exploring how to exploit these vulnerabilities, is an extension of this work. Dr. Ng will continue all aspects of this work as an independent investigator and is grateful for support from ASH that aids the pursuit of these research aims.

Diu Nguyen, DPhil

Dr. Nguyen is a postdoctoral scholar at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She obtained her MSc in biomolecular sciences from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT, in 2010. She was then awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship to complete her PhD from the University of Oxford, UK. Her doctoral work focused on the role of the chromatin remodeler ATRX in congenital genetic disorders and cancers. She uncovered the genomic regions ATRX interacts with and how ATRX loss leads to genome instability. In 2016, Diu moved to Memorial Sloan Kettering for her postdoctoral training in Dr. Michael Kharas’ laboratory, investigating the role of post-transcriptional regulation in normal and malignant HSCs. She pioneered the use of RNA editing-based approaches to identify RNA targets of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) in rare mammalian stem cells, which has provided critical insights into RBP functions and created a new avenue for stem cell research. Most recently, Dr. Nguyen and colleagues discovered the oncogenic role of numerous RBPs in myeloid leukemia. For her ASH Scholar Award project, Dr. Diu will study the mechanisms for how potentially targetable RBPs regulate LSCs. She is grateful for this critical support from ASH during her transition to an independent investigator.

Hai Dang Nguyen, PhD

Dr. Nguyen is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a member of the Masonic Cancer Center. He earned his PhD from the University of Minnesota and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in the laboratory of Dr. Lee Zou. By using a combination of genetic, molecular, and biochemical approaches, he demonstrated that inhibiting regulatory circuitry of R-loops, a three-stranded nucleic acid structure containing an RNA:DNA hybrid and a displaced single-stranded DNA, may be an effective targeted treatment approach for splicing factor-mutant MDS and leukemias. His laboratory aims to develop new experimental tools to reveal molecular mechanisms underlying R-loop response pathways in different cancers and seeks to apply this knowledge to design the next generation of targeted therapeutic strategies. Dr. Nguyen is committed to a career at the intersection of basic and translational cancer research, prioritizing discoveries that can be translated for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. The ASH Scholar Award will enable him to make important fundamental insights into DNA damage response and R-loop homeostasis in MDS and leukemias to provide new mechanistic rationales for future therapeutic development.

Oreofe O. Odejide, MD, MPH

Dr. Odejide is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a hematologic oncologist in the Lymphoma Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Dr. Odejide earned her medical degree from Howard University in Washington, DC, and completed her internal medicine residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She then pursued a hematology/oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber/Mass General Brigham Fellowship Program, while also completing her MPH degree at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Odejide conducts health outcomes and health services research focused on developing patient-centered interventions to improve quality of life and quality of care for patients with hematologic malignancies throughout their disease trajectory. Her worked has ranged from developing strategies to improve palliative and end-of-life care for patients with hematologic malignancies, to characterizing factors to promote effective psychosocial coping for patients who are newly diagnosed with blood cancers. Dr. Odejide is grateful to have been selected to receive the ASH Scholar Award. This award will enable her to refine and pilot a video-based intervention to alleviate clinically-significant fear of cancer recurrence and improve quality of life among lymphoma survivors.

Ami Patel, MD

Dr. Patel is currently an assistant professor at the University of Utah/Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City. She obtained her undergraduate degree at Northwestern University and her MD from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. She remained at Northwestern University for her internal medicine residency and traveled west for her hematology/oncology training to the University of Utah, where she served as chief fellow and completed an advanced research year supported by the ASH Research Training Award for Fellows. During fellowship, Dr. Patel joined the laboratory of Dr. Michael Deininger in order to study the biology of drug resistance to targeted therapies in myeloid malignancies. Her work in the Deininger lab resulted in Dr. Patel identifying a novel JAK2 mutation associated with hypereosinophilia and ruxolitinib resistance. She also identified dasatinib as an effective inhibitor of bone marrow stroma-based resistance to FLT3 inhibitors in FLT3-ITD+ AML. Her experience investigating resistance to kinase inhibitors has led her pursue a translational research career in malignant hematology with a focus on myeloid leukemias. Dr. Patel’s ASH Scholar Award will focus on implementing a phase II clinical trial of the MEK inhibitor cobimetinib in RAS-pathway–activated CMML while collecting correlative specimens to identify kinase-dependent and adaptive resistance mechanisms to cobimetinib treatment. She is deeply honored to be a recipient of the ASH Scholar Award, which will provide critical support as she develops her independent research program aimed at improving therapies for patients with MDS/MPN overlap syndromes.

Brooke Sadler, PhD

Dr. Sadler is an instructor in the Department of Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine, where she studies the genetic basis of pediatric bleeding and clotting disorders. completed her PhD at Washington University School of Medicine in the laboratory of Dr. Alison Goate, where she studied the evolutionary genetics of addiction phenotypes. She then was a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Christina Gurnett, where she applied her genetic background to pediatric musculoskeletal and neurological phenotypes including scoliosis, clubfoot and Chiari 1 malformation. She developed a strong human genetics skillset, and performs exhaustive sets of analyses on large next-generation datasets to uncover new causes of human disease. She was very excited to take her current position, as her father also studied bleeding and clotting disorders, and it seemed as if there were a lot of room for genetic discoveries in this field. Most recently, she has discovered an association between burden of rare variants in the VWF gene and VWF:Ag levels, as well as an enrichment of rare variants in anemia-related genes in patients with heavy menstrual bleeding. The ASH Scholar Award has allowed her to begin studying whole-genome sequence data of families with a history of von Willebrand disease.

Ansuman Satpathy, MD, PhD

Dr. Satpathy is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute; the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy; and the immunology, cancer biology, and biomedical informatics programs at Bio-X; and is a faculty fellow in ChEM-H. Dr. Satpathy completed an MD and PhD in immunology at Washington University in St. Louis, clinical residency in pathology at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, and postdoctoral training in genetics at Stanford University. Dr. Satpathy’s research group focuses on developing and applying genome-scale technologies to study fundamental properties of the immune system in health, infection, and cancer.

 

Kristen E. Schratz, MD

Dr. Schratz is an instructor in the Departments of Oncology and Pathology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she cares for children and adults with inherited predisposition to hematologic malignancy. She earned her MD from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and completed her residency in pediatrics at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital at Columbia University. Dr. Schratz went on to specialize in pediatric hematology/oncology completing fellowship in the combined program at Johns Hopkins University and the National Cancer Institute. After clinical training, Dr. Schratz joined the laboratory of Dr. Mary Armanios where she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in genetics, studying the role of telomere defects and other factors in driving hematologic malignancies. With Dr. Armanios, her work defined the natural history and somatic landscape of short telomere-mediated myeloid malignancies and expanded short telomere syndrome manifestations to include premature age-related clonal hematopoiesis. Aided by the support of the ASH Scholar Award, Dr. Schratz identified telomere-specific somatic reversion mechanisms that are protective of developing MDS and AML in patients with germline telomerase mutations. Her ongoing work focuses on the determinants of myeloid clonal evolution.

Roni Shouval, MD, PhD

Dr. Shouval received his MD from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and completed an internal medicine residency and hematology fellowship under the mentorship of Prof. Arnon Nagler at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Israel. In 2018 he obtained a PhD in machine learning from Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His research has focused on predicting and preventing toxicity and mortality related to allogeneic HSC transplantation. In a series of studies, he led the development of data-driven tools for transplantation risk assessment. His work was among the first to apply machine learning techniques in prognostic modeling of hematologic malignancies. He has also worked extensively with international societies to guide the optimal donor hierarchy in transplantation. Dr. Shouval joined the BMT service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer as a fellow, and since 2021, he has served as an attending on the service. He is a member of the van den Brink lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering where he is developing tools to incorporate microbiome data into clinical decision-making. The ASH Scholar Award will help support his research efforts.

Koichi Takahashi, MD, PhD

Dr. Takahashi is an associate professor at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Department of Leukemia. He earned his medical degree from Niigata University and PhD from Kyoto University, both in Japan. He completed internal medicine residency at Toranomon Hospital, Tokyo, and at Beth Israel Medical Center. He then completed hematology and oncology fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center. His laboratory studies etiology, pathogenesis, and clinical phenotype of hematologic malignancies and premalignancies by understanding the underlying genetic underpinnings, heterogeneity, and evolution through application of state-of-the-art genomics and single-cell technologies coupled with computational analytics. His previous work revealed how clonal hematopoiesis contributes to the development of therapy myeloid neoplasms (Takahashi et al., Lancet Oncology 2017; Hsu et al., Cell Stem Cell 2018). His recent work has also revealed the clonal heterogeneity in AML and how it contributes to therapeutic resistance (Morita et al., Nature Comm 2020; Wang et al., Nature Comm 2021). He is a recipient of the Sabin Family Foundation Award.

Aimee Talleur, MD

Dr. Aimee Talleur is an assistant member in the Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy (BMTCT) at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, specializing in the clinical investigation of novel immunotherapies for the treatment of high-risk malignant disorders. She completed her BA at Union College, MD at SUNY Upstate Medical University, pediatric residency at Children’s National Medical Center, and fellowships in pediatric hematology/oncology and BMTCT at St. Jude. During fellowship, Dr. Talleur worked in the lab investigating the use of allogeneic memory T-cell subsets as effector cells in CAR therapy, seeking to minimize the risk of graft-versus-host-disease when using a donor-derived CAR-T product. Now as a physician scientist, Dr. Talleur focuses on the advancement of novel cellular therapies through early-phase clinical trials. She is honored to receive the ASH Scholar Award in support of her project, a phase I study investigating the use of allogeneic memory T-cells expressing CD19-specific CARs in pediatric patients with relapsed/refractory leukemia. The expectation is that establishing the safety and dosing of allogeneic CAR-Ts will allow for greater opportunities to use CAR-Ts in different clinical settings, including for other malignant disorders. Dr. Talleur would like to thank her primary mentors, Drs. Stephen Gottschalk and Brandon Triplett, as well as the ASH Clinical Research Training Institute, for their support and guidance of both this project and in her career development.

Elisa ten Hacken, PhD

Dr. ten Hacken is an instructor in medicine in Dr. Catherine Wu’s laboratory at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. She graduated with a PhD in Biology and Biotherapy of Cancer from Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, in 2014, and carried out her first postdoctoral training at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, under the supervision of Dr. Jan Burger. She joined the Wu lab in July 2016 for a second postdoctoral fellowship, with deep interest in functional genomics. Her graduate and postgraduate studies have focused on the pathogenesis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), both through the study of primary patients’ samples (also in the context of clinical correlative studies) and of genetically engineered mouse models. Her current work is focused on the development of mouse models of Richter’s syndrome, achieved through CRISPR-Cas9–based engineering of multiplexed gene mutations informed by human studies. Her 2020 ASH Annual Meeting abstract, featured in the Best of ASH session, described generation of these models, showing remarkable genetic and phenotypic similarity to human disease. Her current ASH Scholar Award project is aimed at dissecting changes in microenvironmental interactions in the context of checkpoint blockade therapy with anti-PD1, which will provide important insight into therapy response/resistance patterns typical of human disease.

Aaron Viny, MD

Dr. Viny is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physician & Surgeons and assistant professor of genetics and development at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He is a laboratory-based physician-scientist focusing on the study of clonal hematopoiesis, MDS, and AMLs. Dr. Viny completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan and received his MD at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. Following internal medicine residency at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical College, he completed his fellowship in hematology/medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Ross L. Levine. During fellowship, he investigated the molecular mechanism of cohesin complex member loss of function in hematopoiesis. His work demonstrated a cohesin “dosage dependency” credentialing cohesin components as bona fide tumor suppressors that alter transcriptional control rather than inducing aneuploidy in MDS and AML. His studies found that mutations in STAG2 led to altered DNA topology and that alterations in chromatin organization led to critical changes in transcriptional regulation, independent of transcription factor gene regulatory control, which contribute to leukemogenesis. Dr. Viny is honored to receive the ASH Scholar Award, which supports his transition to an independent investigator.

Julia Z. Xu, MD, MScGH

Dr. Xu is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, specializing in the care of patients with SCD. She received undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and Spanish and an MS in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. With a longstanding interest in both red cell disorders and health disparities, she earned her MD from Columbia University. and as a Doris Duke research fellow, studied glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency in a Dominican HIV clinic. She pursued combined internal medicine–global health residency training at Duke University and worked with Dr. Marilyn Telen to identify factors associated with progressive SCD nephropathy. She also obtained her MSc degree in global health and studied thalassemia screening in migrant populations in Thailand as a Fogarty Gloal Health Fellow with Dr. Vip Viprakasit. She completed her hematology fellowship at NIH, where she worked with Dr. Swee Lay Thein, leading early-phase clinical trials of mitapivat (AG-348), a pyruvate kinase activator, in patients with SCD. Dr. Xu is honored to receive the ASH Scholar Award, which will enable her to study the safety and efficacy of erythropoiesis-stimulating agents in SCD, with the long-term goal of improving treatment options for anemia in SCD.

Moua Yang, PhD

Dr. Yang completed his PhD in 2018 at the Medical College of Wisconsin where his training was performed in Dr. Roy Silverstein’s laboratory at the Blood Research Institute of Versiti Blood Center of Wisconsin. Dr. Yang’s PhD focused on platelet redox signaling in arterial thrombosis as it relates to dyslipidemia. He further pursued his training as a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Hemostasis and Thrombosis at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Dr. Robert Flaumenhaft’s laboratory. Dr. Yang’s project is currently focused on cysteine electron transferring pathways by thiol isomerases. Using sophisticated intravital microscopy and chemical biology approaches, Dr. Yang investigates the function of oxidative cysteine modification on thiol isomerases and their ability to regulate clot formation in diseased conditions. Dr. Yang is committed to a career in the basic sciences of thrombosis and hemostasis. He was the 2018 recipient of the Mary Rodes Gibson Memorial Award in Hemostasis and Thrombosis and is an active member of the ASH Trainee Council. The ASH Scholar Award is instrumental for Dr. Yang in developing an independent transformative project focused on cysteine modifications in bleeding and blood clotting.

Christine Zhang, PhD

Dr. Zhang is a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in Saint Louis. She completed her PhD in epigenetics and neuroscience at the University of Queensland in Australia under the supervision of Dr. Emma Whitelaw, to study the long-term impact of early-life epigenetic disruptions on brain structure and function. She then briefly worked with Dr. Andrew Moore to discover molecular biomarkers of pediatric acute leukemia using a targeted sequencing platform, where she developed a strong interest in identifying the mechanism underlying leukemogenesis. Since 2019, Dr. Zhang has been undertaking her postdoctoral training with Dr. Grant Challen to investigate how mutations in an epigenetic modifier, DNA methyltransferase 3A (DNMT3A), convey a fitness advantage to HSCs during chronic inflammatory signaling and how this process primes clonal hematopoiesis to malignant transformation. The ASH Scholar Award will enable her to elucidate molecular networks that endow a fitness advantage to Dnmt3a-mutant HSCs during type II interferon signaling, to identify disease-prone populations for malignant transformation, and to discover potential therapeutic opportunities to reduce the risks of blood disease development.

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