Annual Scientific Conference

Cancer Biology Annual Scientific Conference, November 2025

Chaminade, Santa Cruz

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: Chaminade Resort Santa Cruz

Program Starts: Thursday, November 6, 2025

Program Ends: Friday, November 7, 2025

Events

2025 Recipient

Noah F. Greenwald, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, San Francisco

Noah received his Bachelor's in Biophysics from Harvard University. He then worked at the Broad Institute, analyzing DNA sequencing data to identify the genomic drivers that separate low-grade and high-grade brain cancers. Following his work at the Broad, he received his Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Stanford University, where he was co-advised by Mike Angelo and Christina Curtis. While at Stanford, Noah developed machine learning tools to profile highly multiplexed imaging data and used these tools to characterize the tumor microenvironment in breast cancer patient samples. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF in the Coyote-Maestas lab, where he is using deep mutational scanning to understand the crosstalk between cancer and immune cells.

2025 Cancer Biology Retreat Winners

Best Talks

Kylie Burdsall
Aswini Krishnan
Karen Linde-Garelli
Brennan SImon

Best Posters

Cesar Garcia
Aditi Gnanasekar
Griffin Hartmann
Kevin Liu

The Denise A. Chan Best Thesis Award in Cancer Biology

2024 Recipient

King L. Hung, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Scripps Research

How do cells sense, interpret, and organize information? Motivated by this overarching question, King started his research career as an undergraduate researcher in Dr. David Kimelman’s lab at the University of Washington, where he studied cell cycle control in pluripotent cells in the developing zebrafish embryo. Inspired by the amazing capability of cells to control cellular programs by changing their state, he spent three years after college in Dr. David Rawlings’ lab investigating how to engineer immune cells to adopt different states and developed a method to engineer human B cells to express therapeutic proteins as a novel therapeutic strategy. During this work, he became interested in understanding how cells organize information in the genome and control gene expression. He joined the Cancer Biology Program at Stanford in 2018 and then Dr. Howard Chang’s lab in 2019 to investigate how cancer cells re-organize their genomes by forming circle DNA outside chromosomes called extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA). During graduate school, he was awarded the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, NIH F99/K00 award, the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, and was named 30 Scientists Under 30 by Forbes Magazine. He is now continuing his scientific adventure at Scripps Research in Dr. Ardem Patapoutian’s lab, focusing on how cells interpret mechanical force and biochemical signals.

2023 Recipient

Emily Hamilton, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Scholar, Dr. Max Diehn, Stanford University School of Medicine

Emily received her BA from Columbia University, majoring in Neuroscience & Behavior and minoring in Music. She then worked as a research assistant at UCSF, where she studied the (epi)genomic evolution of low-grade glioma in the lab of Dr. Joe Costello, and pre-natal exposure to toxic flame retardants in the lab of Dr. Susan Fisher. She entered the Cancer Biology PhD Program at Stanford in 2016, where she joined the labs of Drs. Max Diehn and Ash Alizadeh. There, her thesis work focused on developing noninvasive methods for the early detection of lung cancer using cell-free DNA. During her PhD, she was awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship from the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP). Emily graduated in December 2022, and continues her research as a postdoc in the Diehn lab where she hopes to validate her recent approach to cancer detection using cell-free DNA methylation.

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.

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.

2020 Recipient

Gunsagar Gulati, M.D., Ph.D.

Resident, Brigham and Women's Hospital Boston

Gunsagar S. Gulati received his undergraduate degree in Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology from Harvard College and his MD and PhD in Cancer Biology from Stanford University in the Weissman and Newman laboratories. He is currently a resident physician in the internal medicine program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and will be short-tracking to fellowship in hematology and oncology. His research has focused on identifying new stem cell populations in normal and cancer tissues and developing computational tools to better understand and treat human tumors. Gunsagar identified new populations of hematopoietic and skeletal stem cells and developed CytoTRACE, a computational approach for predicting the developmental potential of single cells from transcriptional data. He aims to build his career at the intersection of stem cell and cancer biology, developing new approaches for identifying and targeting cancer stem cells. His ultimate goal is to lead an academic research group as a physician scientist who sees cancer patients in the clinic and studies their disease in the laboratory.

2019 Recipient

Humsa Venkatesh, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Rob Malenka Lab, Stanford University

Humsa Venkatesh received her undergraduate degree in Chemical Biology from the University of California, Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Stanford University. She is currently completing her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Her research combines principles of neuroscience and cancer biology to understand the electrical components of cancer pathophysiology. Humsa discovered the relationship between the bioelectric activity of neurons and tumor growth and further identified a therapeutic target which, when inhibited, stagnates tumor growth in vivo. She aims to build her career leading the advancement of this novel field by studying the neural regulation of cancer and investigating the specific neural circuits whose aberrant activity contributes to disease progression. Her ultimate goal is to harness these microenvironmental dependencies of tumors for future therapeutic interventions.

2018 Recipient

Dian Yang Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Jonathan Weissman Lab, University of California, San Francisco

Dian Yang grew up in Beijing, China. He started his PhD in the Cancer Biology Program in 2011, working with Dr. Monte Winslow and Dr. Julien Sage. His thesis work focused on the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms of cancer metastasis, the most lethal phase of cancer progression. Using genetically engineered mouse models of small cell lung cancer, he uncovered widespread chromatin accessibility changes during metastatic progression, which activates a neuronal migration program that promotes cancer metastasis. He also uncovered that the cancer cell of origin has profound impact on metastatic progression. Dian is currently a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSF working with Dr. Jonathan Weissman on developing new functional genomic tools to understand tissue homeostasis and cancer development.

2017 Recipient

Jing Shan Lim, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Wai Leong Tam Lab, Genome Institute of Singapore

Jing Shan Lim grew up in Singapore and moved to the United States for her undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she worked with Dr. Lin-Feng Chen on the tumor suppressor RUNX3 in breast cancer. In 2010, she joined the Cancer Biology Program at Stanford University. Her thesis work in the laboratory of Dr. Julien Sage demonstrated that the Notch signaling pathway can have both pro-tumorigenic and tumor suppressive roles in small cell lung cancer. Jing is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Wai Leong Tam’s lab at the Genome Institute of Singapore, where she is studying tumor-stroma interactions and chemoresistance in pancreatic cancer.

2016 Recipient

Ryan Corces, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Howard Chang Lab

Ryan Corces received his BA in Molecular Biology from Princeton University in 2008 where he studied aging in the model organism C. elegans. He began his PhD in 2009, working in the laboratory of Dr. Ravi Majeti. His thesis work centered around the identification and characterization of a pre-leukemic phase in human acute myeloid leukemia (AML), demonstrating that AML arises from a step-wise accumulation of mutations in functionally-normal hematopoietic stem cells. Ryan is currently studying the interplay of chromatin architecture and cancer as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Howard Chang at Stanford.

2015 Recipient

Jeanine Van Nostrand, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Reuben Shaw Lab

Jeanine "Frey” Van Nostrand grew up in rural Nebraska and went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for undergraduate school where she did her thesis work with Dr. Julie Stone studying programmed cell death in Arabidopsis. In 2007, she joined the cancer biology graduate program at Stanford University where she did her PhD thesis work in Dr. Laura Attardi’s lab studying the role of p53 and p53 target genes in embryogenesis and cancer. She joined the laboratory of Dr. Reuben Shaw at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA for her postdoctoral studies in the summer of 2014 where she is interested in exploring the in vivo role of LKB1- and AMPK-regulation in development and tumorigenesis using mouse models.

2014 Recipient

Daniel Webster, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, National Cancer Institute

Daniel Webster received his BS in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin where he worked on hematopoietic stem cell biology. He obtained his PhD from the Stanford Cancer Biology Program under the mentorship of Dr. Paul Khavari. His research at Stanford combined bioinformatics and functional genetics to discover functional elements in the human genome driving epidermal development and tumorigenesis. His thesis work uncovered an epigenetic, tissue-specific mechanism of innate drug resistance in melanoma. He is currently a Damon Runyon Fellow at the National Cancer Institute working with Dr. Louis Staudt on B cell lymphoma genomics.

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