School of Medicine
Showing 641-650 of 813 Results
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Cort Breuer
Ph.D. Student in Immunology, admitted Autumn 2022
BioCort Breuer is currently an Immunology PhD student in the lab of Nathan Reticker-Flynn. Cort received his BS in Biological Engineering from Cornell University in 2022, where he studied lymphatic-cancer interactions and T cell mechanosensing in the lab of Esak Lee. Previously, he worked with James Moon at Massachusetts General Hospital to develop in vivo gene therapies for the immune system and with Michelle Krogsgaard at NYU Perlmutter Cancer Center to investigate structural biology of TCR signaling. Cort’s current work focuses on mechanisms of tumor-immune tolerance and decoding the antigen specificity of T cell receptors. Drawing on his engineering background, he designs new molecular tools to record how immune cells communicate and constructs therapeutics to target impaired immune responses.
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Francesca Briganti
Instructor, Cardiovascular Institute
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOne gene can lead to the production of many different RNA isoforms via mechanisms such as alternative promoter usage, splicing, and polyadenylation. The functional significance of many of these isoforms, their impact on cell physiology, and their regulation remain mostly controversial. Understanding the functional consequences of transcript heterogeneity will improve our understanding of gene expression regulation, broadening our ability to intervene when mutations that interfere with this regulation cause human disease.
My goal is to become an independent researcher leading an academic lab that focuses on better understanding human tissue-specific post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression and developing mechanism-based therapeutics. My general strategy is to study the function of regulatory genes and their deregulation in human disease. My specific approach is to understand the molecular mechanisms by which disease-causing mutations alter the gene function and lead to human disease. My hypothesis is that a detailed understanding of the relationship between the gene's molecular function and the disease mechanism will allow the development of first-in-class, personalized therapeutic strategies that target the disease mechanisms rather than manage symptoms independently of disease etiology.
