Annual Scientific Conference

Cancer Biology Annual Scientific Conference, October 2022

Hayes Mansion

The Annual Scientific Conference provides an opportunity for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to present their research progress to the faculty and their peers. In addition, the Conference is designed to acquaint new first year graduate students with the Program and to inform them of research opportunities. Faculty members have the opportunity to present at a poster session. Cancer Biology graduate students are required to attend the Conference.  

Location: Hayes Mansion

Program Starts: Friday, October 28, 2022

Program Ends: Saturday, October 29, 2022

Events

2022 Recipient

Andrea Chaikovsky, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr. Scott Lowe Lab, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Andrea earned her bachelor's degree from UCLA, where she studied the role of cellular metabolism in the differentiation of human embryonic stem cells in the lab of Dr. Michael Teitell. After graduating in 2015, she entered the Cancer Biology program at Stanford and joined the lab of Dr. Julien Sage. In the Sage lab, she studied novel mechanisms that regulate the activity of the RB tumor suppressor, with an eye towards better understanding cancer resistance to CDK4/6 inhibitors. During her PhD, she was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the F99/K00 Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Transition Award from the NCI. She graduated from Stanford in December 2021 and transitioned to a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Scott Lowe at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, There, she is studying how mechanisms regulating cellular plasticity promote the benign-to-malignant transition in pancreatic cancer.

2022 Cancer Biology Retreat Winners

Best Talks 

  • Emily Ashkin
  • Noah Greenwald
  • Logan Leak
  • William Shi

 

Best Posters

  • Tony Boutelle
  • Aswini Krishnan
  • Catherine Zhang

The Denise A. Chan Best Thesis Award in Cancer Biology

2021 Recipient

Kathryn Yost, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Johnathan Weissman Lab, Whitehead Institute, Boston

Katie Yost received her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Washington and Lee University and completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology at Stanford University in the lab of Howard Chang. She is currently a NCI K00 Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Jonathan Weissman at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, MA. Her research utilizes genomic technologies and functional perturbations to better understand cellular and regulatory dynamics in cancer progression and response to therapy. Katie discovered that the T cell response to PD-1 blockade consists of novel T cell clones not previously observed in the same tumor, a process termed clonal replacement. Further, she found that extrachromosomal DNA clusters in the nucleus of interphase cancer cells to promote intermolecular enhancer-promoter interactions and high levels of oncogene expression. Her long-term goal is to decode the dynamic interactions between cancer and the immune system and to perturb these systems to gain novel insights into the biological processes that underlie cancer progression and therapeutic response.