School of Medicine
Showing 1-10 of 49 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, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Professor Crystal Mackall’s group at Stanford Cancer Institute.
Dr. Chen studied biochemistry and structural biology in her undergraduate and master trainings at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she eventually obtained her Ph.D. degree in computational biology under the supervision of Professor Jiguang Wang. During her Ph.D. training, she has developed her skill sets in analyzing and integrating various types of patient-derived sequencing data, published three first-author and four co-author papers, and received two awards for top postgraduate students. Through interdisciplinary collaborations with cancer biologist and clinicians in US and Asia, her work has uncovered tumor-specific immune cell subtypes and novel noncoding RNAs and generated new insights into precision medicine in glioma, lymphoma and gastric cancer.
Applying her expertise in computational cancer biology and immunology, her current research is focused on identifying molecular mechanisms that contribute to the clinical outcomes of patients undergoing CAR-T immunotherapy. At Mackall Lab, she will contribute to tailoring computational pipelines for profiling the spatiotemporal dynamics of the tumor and immune microenvironment and translate new discoveries into cancer therapeutics. -
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.