Dr. Kliment Verba is an Assistant Professor at the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) and Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF. Dr. Verba uses biophysical methods such as cryo-EM (cryogenic electron microscopy) to study structural biology and elucidate how proteins look in 3D, down to atomic details. His work spans topics…

Dr. Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist, author, and blogger. He is currently Director in Chemical Biology and Therapeutics at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR). Dr. Lowe’s work in drug discovery has spanned multiple decades with tenures at Schering-Plough, Bayer, and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. In addition to his industry work, Dr. …

Dr. Eric Wang is an Assistant Professor at The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) for Genomic Medicine. Dr. Wang's work has uncovered new therapeutic vulnerabilities in RNA-binding protein networks in leukemia through the use of genomic screening approaches, which we discuss in this episode. His lab investigates therapy resistance in cancer, with a focus on …

Dr. Mario Suva is an Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, is affiliated with the Neuro-Oncology program at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and is a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Suva's lab focuses on the biology of brain tumors, using single-cell technologies to di…

Dr. Mariella G. Filbin is an Attending Physician of Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. The Filbin Lab focuses its efforts on studying pediatric brain tumors, particularly lethal high-grade gliomas, incl…

Laura Valente is a PhD student in the Department of Pathology at Duke University School of Medicine. She conducts research in the lab of Dr. Anthony Filiano, who is a faculty member in the Neurosurgery, Immunology, and Pathology departments at Duke. Laura's work focuses on developing mouse models of thymus transplants done in patients to understand…

Dr. Kris Wood is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. The Wood Lab utilizes functional genomics approaches to uncover targetable vulnerabilities in different types of human cancers. Much of this work is driven by investigation of the complex sign…

Dr. Herman Staats is a Professor and the Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pathology at Duke University School of Medicine. Broadly, the Staats Lab focuses on vaccines and immunity. The lab's main projects include identifying and characterizing new adjuvants, and optimizing nasal immunization for use in humans. An adjuvant is any substan…

Katie Stember is a PhD candidate in the lab of Dr. Ronald Falk at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine. Broadly speaking, Katie works on a family of autoimmune diseases called antineutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibody (ANCA) vasculitis, which affects blood vessels throughout the body. Her research focuses on the interaction betwe…

Eric Wang is a PhD candidate in the lab of Dr. Iannis Aifantis at the NYU School of Medicine. Broadly speaking, Eric's research focuses on transcriptional regulation during leukemia initiation. To this end, he recently conducted a pooled CRISPR screen on about 500 target genes, from which a gene involved in RNA splicing emerged as a top candidate a…

Dr. Aristotelis Tsirigos is an Associate Professor of Pathology and the Director of the Applied Bioinformatics Center at the NYU School of Medicine, where his group uses computational methods to study biology. In particular, his work has centered around using computer science to elucidate epigenetic alterations in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemi…

Dr. Yiping He is an Assistant Professor of Pathology at Duke University, where his lab focuses on exploiting genetic alterations for cancer treatments, particularly for glioblastoma (GBM), a type of brain tumor. Another area of focus in the He Lab is medulloblastoma, which is a type of malignant pediatric brain tumor located in the cerebellum, the …

Dr. Bryan Field is an Assistant Professor of Physics at SUNY Farmingdale on Long Island, New York. He is a theoretical particle physicist, and his work focuses on understanding results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and in the past he has actively collaborated on experiments involving ATLAS, which is one of two general-purpose detecto…

Dr. Vanja Sisirak is a Research Associate in the department of Pathology at the NYU School of Medicine. He is a member of the Reizis Lab, where he studies the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease in which the the body's immune system attacks "self" rather than foreign pathogens. Although lupus is difficult to diagnose…

Dr. Sarah LeBoeuf is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Pathology at the NYU School of Medicine. She is a member of the Papagiannakopoulos Lab, where she uses genetically engineered mouse models to study the role of mitochondria and reactive oxygen species stress in the development and progression of lung cancer. Among the goals of Dr. …

Joey Verdi is a PhD candidate in the lab of Dr. Jayne Raper at CUNY-Hunter College, where he is conducting research on the apolipoprotein L-1 (apoL1) gene and its variants across multiple species of primates and monkeys. The apoL1 protein produced by this gene is a part of a larger complex of proteins termed trypanosome lytic factors (TLFs), which …

Dr. Andrew Hill is a cognitive neuroscientist and lecturer at UCLA. He conducts research on attention and cognitive performance, and he is the Lead Neuroscientist for truBrain, a start-up that offers nootropic supplements, in the form of capsules and drinks (nootropics are drugs that may enhance memory and focus, however much of the research elucid…

Dr. Ernest Davis is a professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He is an expert on artificial intelligence - he studies the problem of representing commonsense knowledge (basic knowledge about the real world that is common to all humans) and expressing it in a form that is systematic eno…

Dr. Adric Riedel is a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics and astronomy at the College of Staten Island in the City University of New York, focusing on local galactic kinematics and low mass and nearby stars. Paige Godfrey is an astrophysics and astronomy PhD student at the City University of New York, interested in studying the formation and e…

Dr. Andrew Darwin is a bacteriologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the NYU School of Medicine. His research focuses on bacterial cell envelope functions that prevent or respond to cellular stress occurring as pathogens infect their hosts. His lab use genetics, molecular biology, and biochemistry, along with various i…

In this episode we chat with students who have taken the first big steps in their scientific careers. Included are PhD students and a master's degree student to provide different points of view on the research process, as well as varying pieces of advice for those interested in taking the scientific path. Featured on this episode (in order of appea…

In this episode we hear from some folks who are essentially at the beginning of their scientific careers - undergraduate students and research assistants. Representing several institutions, for the most part in New York City, these students give some insight into their experiences as scientific researchers at their respective levels. Featured on th…

Dr. Bo Shopsin is an Assistant Professor in the departments of medicine and microbiology at the NYU School of Medicine. His research focuses on adaptive changes in the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus that take place during infection. One of his studies addresses the within-host variation in the agr (accessory gene regulator) locus, a global regulat…

Dr. Nathalie Scholler is the Director of Cancer Immunology at the Center for Cancer and Metabolism at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, California. Her research is centered around studying the role of the immune system in tumor development and designing novel diagnostic and immunotherapeutic approaches against cancer.…

Dr. Carmen Melendez-Vasquez is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on actomyosin regulation and the mechanism of myelin formation. Actomyosin is a protein complex crucial for cell motility and contractile force in muscle and other tissues. Myelin is a highly specialized membra…

Dr. Maryam Modjaz is an Assistant Professor in Astrophysics at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University. Her research addresses forefront problems in stellar death astrophysics through extensive and panchromatic observations of various types of massive stellar explosions, specifically Gamma Ray Bursts and Supernovae, whi…

Dr. Kirk Deitsch is a microbiologist/immunologist and professor of microbiology and immunology at the Weill Cornell Medical College. His research focuses on Plasmodium falciparum, the most virulent of the parasites that cause malaria in humans. P. falciparum infects red blood cells, causing disease through anemia resulting from red cell destruction…

Dr. Matthew Kleban is a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at New York University. His research focuses on the intersection between string theory, cosmology, and particle physics. He is interested in the physics of black holes and gravitational thermodynamics, early universe cosmology and its implications for fundamental physics, and in…

Dr. Jayne Raper is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on trypanosome lytic factors (TLFs), which are antimicrobial high-density lipoproteins that contribute to the innate immunity of primates. TLFs have the ability to to kill African trypanosomes, a parasite, via their uniqu…

Dr. David Amodio is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. His research examines the psychological and neural mechanisms of intergroup relations and self-regulation, considering the roles of social cognition, emotion, and motivation as they relate to implicit processes and mechanisms of control in social beh…