Principal Investigator
David M. Kurtz, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine (Oncology)
Dr. Kurtz is a physician-scientist in the Department of Medicine, Division of Oncology at Stanford University. He performed his undergraduate studies in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology before completing his MD at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Kurtz then came to Stanford, where he completed his training in internal medicine as part of the Translational Investigator Program. Dr. Kurtz then completed his fellowship training in hematology and oncology at Stanford, during which time he also completed his PhD in Bioengineering as part of the Advanced Residency Training at Stanford program under the mentorship of Dr. Ash Alizadeh. Dr. Kurtz played a leading role in the development of several methods to detect and monitor circulating tumor DNA through next-generation sequencing. His expertise lies at the intersection of molecular and computational biology, bioengineering, genomics, and clinical oncology.
Stanford Profile | Google Scholar | ResearchGate
Laboratory Manager
George E. Duran
Cancer biologist specializing in the development of novel chemotherapeutic agents and in mechanisms of drug resistance. Current research ranges from molecular studies to further understand the heterogeneity of T-cell lymphomas, to translational studies of molecular determinants of therapeutic response, and clinical trials that use the body’s immune system to fight cancer cells.
Fellows
Jordan Goldstein, MD
Dr. Goldstein attended Emory University School of Medicine, where he also completed a Masters of Science in Clinical Research. At Emory, he performed research under the mentorship of Dr. Christopher Flowers developing digital pathology informatics algorithms and assessing outcomes in lymphoma. While in residency at Weill Cornell Medical Center, he performed research building natural language processing algorithms to extract adverse events for clinical trials from electronic health records. Jordan hopes to further his research interests in informatics, utilizing advanced computational approaches to build personalized prognostic models, and early phase clinical trials in lymphoid malignancies.
Ruwan Gunaratne, MD, PhD
Dr. Gunaratne is a physician-scientist fellow in Hematology & Oncology at Stanford. Originally from Florida, Ruwan completed his MD and PhD in Pharmacology at Duke University, where he studied the use of nucleic acid aptamers and scavengers as antidote-controllable anticoagulants and anti-metastatic therapeutics. In the Kurtz lab, he is interested in applying genomic technologies for minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring in hematologic malignancies.
Hitomi Hosoya, MD, PhD
Dr. Hosoya obtained an MD-PhD from the University of Tokyo, where she conducted cancer research focusing on nanomedicine and drug delivery. She moved to Philadelphia to pursue further training in internal medicine then came to Stanford for Hematology fellowship. Her clinical focus is on multiple myeloma and plasma cell neoplasms. She is active in clinical care as well as clinical and translational research focused on these diseases.
Julia Ransohoff, MD
Dr. Ransohoff is a hematology and oncology fellow in the physician scientist research pathway at Stanford, where she also completed training in internal medicine. Her clinical focus is in breast and hereditary cancers, and her research focuses on minimal residual disease detection, outcomes prediction, and translational genomics applied to breast cancer.
Brian J. Sworder, MD, PhD
Dr. Sworder is a physician-scientist with an interest in lymphoma and immunotherapy. He is currently an Instructor in the Division of Oncology, where he has led efforts to use genomic tools to determine mechanisms of resistance to chimeric antigen receptor T-cells.
Staff Researcher
Mia Carleton
Born and raised in San Francisco, Mia Carleton went on to receive her B.A. from the University of Chicago, where she studied biology on the pre-med track. She has previously worked in clinical research at the UCSF Multiple Sclerosis Center and is now excited to move toward translational research in the Kurtz Lab.
MD Candidate
Alisha Maltos
Alisha Maltos recieved her B.S. in Bioengineering from Stanford University. She has previous research experience in medical device development and invented OpticLine, a device that detects peritonitis earlier in patients using peritoneal dialysis. Her current work in the Kurtz lab consists of developing new bioinformatic tools and sequencing methods to better characterize and detect residual disease.
Undergraduate
Joe Paavola
Joe Paavola is an undergraduate at Stanford studying biology and the application of computer science to medicine. He works on wet-lab experiments as well as developing new software for analyzing genomic data.