School of Medicine
Showing 1-10 of 46 Results
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Aya Awad
Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Cancer Institute
BioI am a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Cancer Institute in the laboratory of Steven Artandi, where my research focuses on telomere biology and telomerase regulation in cancer. My work integrates molecular genetics, biochemistry, and cell-based approaches to understand how dysregulation of telomere maintenance promotes genome instability and tumorigenesis.
I received my PhD in Genetics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where my doctoral research examined the molecular mechanisms by which telomerase activity and telomere structure are regulated at chromosome ends. Through mechanistic studies combining patient-derived cells and molecular analyses, I contributed to defining how telomere elongation and overhang dynamics are controlled.
At Stanford, my research centers on identifying regulatory pathways that control telomerase RNA maturation and activity, with a particular interest in discovering and characterizing small-molecule inhibitors targeting the telomerase pathway as potential cancer therapeutics. More broadly, I aim to translate fundamental insights in telomere biology into strategies for selectively targeting telomere maintenance mechanisms in cancer. -
Yiyun Chen
Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Cancer Institute
BioYiyun Chen is a computational cancer immunologist whose interdisciplinary training spans structural biology, computational genomics, and cancer immunotherapy. During her doctoral training at HKUST, she developed multi-omic frameworks to decode the molecular landscape of brain tumors, gastric cancer, and B cell lymphoma — including the discovery of a tumor-associated monocyte population in the glioma microenvironment that drives mesenchymal transformation through the FOSL2-EREG/AREG-EGFR signaling axis.
As a postdoctoral fellow in the Crystal Mackall Laboratory at Stanford Cancer Institute, she extended this focus to the co-evolution of glioma and the immune system during CAR T cell therapy, uncovering multiple mechanisms of acquired resistance: anti-CAR humoral and cellular immunity, proinflammatory-to-immunosuppressive phenotypic shifts in macrophages, and tumor antigen escape. Her future research program will build an AI-powered platform that integrates longitudinal single-cell and spatial transcriptomics to model tumor-immune co-evolution in silico — constructing patient-level digital twins that simulate treatment trajectories, predict resistance, and identify real-time monitoring biomarkers. -
Jordan C. Cheng, DMD, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Cancer Institute
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research direction involves the evalutation of single-stranded library prepartion methods versus conventional double-stranded methods of cell-free DNA for non-invasive cancer profiling applications. The exploration of these technologies allow for the inference of the genomic and epigenetic features of both local and distant cell types associated with a biofluid.
