Renu Dhanasekaran, MD 

I am a physician scientist, the Pricipal Investigator (PI) of our lab.  I completed my medical school training in India before moving to the US. I pursued my Internal Medicine residency at the University of Florida, Gainesville followed by Gastroenterology fellowship at Mayo Clinic, Rochester and Transplant Hepatology fellowship at Stanford University. 

The focal point of my research career has been the study of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). I believe in taking a strong translational approach to study cancer biology using a bench-to-bedside multipronged approach. We actively employ mouse models of liver cancer, patient derived xenografts and genomic data from human HCC to study the role of tumor immune microenvironment and decode the heterogeneity of HCC.

I love mentoring students. I have formally and  informally mentored several students, residents and research fellows over the past few years. Watching my mentees succeed and move on to pursue their dreams is one of the greatest sources of joy for me, and I look forward to continuing to mentor more students and trainees in the coming years.

I am passionate about patient care and my clinical practice is mainly focused on liver cancer and I run a clinic specifically for patients with liver masses. My patients serve as the main source of inspiration for my research questions. I also directly recruit patients from my clinic to my translational research. Apart from the liver mass clinic, my other clinical activities include performing endoscopy and participating in tumor boards.

Lea Lemaitre, PhD

I completed my PhD in the field of cancer microenvironment at the Cancer Research Center in Toulouse, France in 2021. My previous work has focused on analyzing the cross-talk between macrophages and mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) in chemotherapy resistant ovarian cancer at the University of Toulouse. I joined the Dhanasekaran lab in 2021 to pursue my postdoctoral fellowship. I’m currently studying the immune tumor microenvironment, specifically, interrogating the involvement of T cells in cancer progression. I have always been convinced that immunotherapies represent the future of anti-cancer treatment. My current work involves the evaluation of immunotherapeutics to treat liver cancer.

Aishwarya Ghonge, MBBS

I joined the Dhanasekaran lab as a research associate in 2024. I am a medical graduate (Class of 2023) from India. I plan to undergo residency training in Internal Medicine and have a strong passion for translational research. I currenlty work on research projects in the lab with a goal to identify biomarkers which predict response to therapies in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).