School of Medicine
Showing 1-10 of 42 Results
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Amirsaman Ashtari
Postdoctoral Scholar, Radiation Biology
BioI am a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, jointly supervised by Ash Alizadeh MD/PhD and Mohammad Shahrokh Esfahani PhD. I developed several AI solutions for the Computer Vision and Computer Graphic domains during my PhD studies at KAIST and ETH Zurich. My PhD research outcome was recognized by winning the Young Researcher Award, and I was eager to apply all those AI techniques to biological data for cancer therapy. In the Alizadeh and Esfahani labs, I will develop AI solutions and computational tools to better understand the tumor microenvironment. Outside of my research, I enjoy loving my family, playing the piano, and listening to music.
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Sijie Chen
Postdoctoral Scholar, Radiation Physics
BioI am a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Lei Xing at Stanford University, where I develop trustworthy autonomous AI agents and foundational informatics systems for single-cell biology. My long-term vision is to build auditable computational infrastructure and virtual cell models that transform massive single-cell atlases into reliable, steerable systems for mechanistic discovery across tissues, diseases, and species. My doctoral work with Prof. Xuegong Zhang established my foundation in single-cell bioinformatics and atlas-scale integration, which I have since extended into large-scale representation modeling, AI agent workflows, and LLM-driven scientific discovery. My current work focuses on developing governed, agentic lifecycles for continuous single-cell data curation and foundation model evaluation, while applying these autonomous systems to power cross-organ virtual cell retrieval and simulate immune-tolerance breakdown.
My ongoing efforts build directly upon my prior work in atlas integration and algorithmic development. As the first author of hECA (Chen et al., 2022), I built a unified human cell atlas integrating one million high-quality cells across 38 organs with a logic-expression query interface. This experience exposed the central bottlenecks—such as heterogeneous formats and ontology grounding—that I now address using LLM-powered agents to enable autonomous metadata harmonization and iterative quality control. I am converting manual curation into an autonomous, agent-driven paradigm where new datasets are continuously ingested and versioned in a traceable manner. Furthermore, my co-development of TorchGW for cell state alignment, TFcomb for perturbation prediction, and TransMap for cross-species alignment provides the algorithmic foundation for next-generation cell foundation models and virtual cell simulation.
By integrating these components into trustworthy, benchmarked, and human-in-the-loop AI infrastructure, my research bridges scalable scientific computing with complex biomedical questions. Through close collaboration with Prof. Edgar Engleman, I am utilizing immune-tolerance breakdown—specifically focusing on a tolerogenic dendritic cell program—as a mechanistic testbed to validate our virtual cell simulations. A core focus of my work is ensuring that every agent-generated hypothesis and retrieved state remains bound to the exact data and model checkpoints that produced it, making findings fully re-derivable as the biological knowledge base evolves. Ultimately, I aim to advance the frontier of trustworthy autonomous single-cell informatics, bridging AI agents, virtual cell engineering, and biological discovery. -
Marina Francis
Postdoctoral Scholar, Radiation Therapy
BioDr. Francis is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Dr. Everett Moding’s lab at the Department of Radiation Oncology. She uses genomic analysis of patient samples and preclinical models to identify new targets that sensitize sarcoma to treatments like radiation and immunotherapy. Before joining Stanford University, she completed her PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the American University of Beirut, where she worked in Dr. Youssef Zeidan’s lab investigating the role of the sphingolipid-modifying enzyme SMPDL3b in radiation nephropathy. Her research interests revolve around improving cancer treatment outcomes and patients’ quality of life by optimizing radiation therapy, combined treatment strategies, personalized precision oncology, and mitigating collateral treatment-associated toxicities.
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Lu Ji
Postdoctoral Scholar, Radiation Biology
BioDriven by the enthusiasm and curiosity about life science and human disease, I have been working on cancer research for more than 5 years. I focus on developing novel therapeutic targets from tumor microenvironment and uncovering mechanisms of tumor progression, especially with expertise in gastrointestinal tumor biology and tumor microenvironment analysis. Now I'm digging into a field about finding a way to empower immunotherapy by appropriately utilizing radiation therapy.
