Personal Statement

Throughout my research career my goal has been to understand the fundamental processes of tumor biology and to translate this knowledge from bench to bedside by the rational development of novel therapies. Early in my career I investigated genetic and genomic aspects of tumor biology in Neurofibromatosis type I (NF1). More recent work has focused on elucidating signaling pathways, epigenetics and the rational development of therapies in NF1 associated but also other RAS-pathway driven. Recent high throughput analysis of large sets of tumors has yielded a wealth of new data. The immediate clinical benefits of this new data however has been limited, in part due to the restricted ability to quickly translate this vast amount of new information into functional studies that definitively prove the therapeutic significance of a gene or pathway. As a bio-engineer, with a strong background in biology, mathematics and statistics, I am ideally placed to translate results from large-scale data analysis to questions relevant to biology and the clinic. As an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, I developed a strong expertize in epigenetics, mouse modeling and preclinical testing. Importantly, my research has been translated into 3 clinical trials for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer and Malignant Peripheral Nerve Sheath Tumors. My lab is located at the Children’s Hospital Philadelphia and is part of the University of Pennsylvania community. With our research program we continue to answer biologically relevant questions and that, whenever possible can be translated to develop novel therapies. The ultimate goal of our lab is the dissection of fundamental processes in tumor biology and the development of rational therapies for cancer.