Petritsch Lab Open Positions

The Petritsch lab is actively recruiting highly motivated postdoctoral trainees who are two or less years past their doctorate. The prospective candidate will participate in one or more of the following projects:

  1. Molecular and cellular mechanistic analyses of asymmetric cell division in OPCs using a candidate gene approach. Candidates are from an expression screen that was recently conducted in the laboratory. The postdoc is expected to develop new tools to study cell fate decisions in the oligodendrocyte lineage using genome editing, live cell imaging, microfluidics and single cell RNA-seq analyses. This work is expected to reveal the underlying biology for cell fate decision making in the brain and provide new insights into dysregulation of glioma cell hierarchies.
  2. Identify the role of OPCs for cellular heterogeneity in the normal brain and in brain tumors. This project emphasizes on the interactions of OPCs with the immune system, and aims to define molecular interactions between tumor cells, OPCs and the immune system to understand and overcome immune suppression in gliomas. The postdoc is expected to isolate human OPCs from fresh brain tissue (normal and tumor), analyze them by -omics methods, and establish ex vivo cultures. The postdoc will maintain transgenic animals for OPC studies to complement human data. These studies are expected to yield important insights into the underlying causes for heterogeneity, both in the normal brain, and in malignant brain tumors.

For more information, please contact Dr. Claudia Petritsch at cpetri@stanford.edu
 

Medical Students:

We have opportunities for medical student research. We are currently looking for medical students for an ongoing part-time research project. One project is to optimize the treatment for children with brain cancer, by generating patient-derived models from difficult to treat brain tumors and using them to establish personalized treatment, including immunotherapies. The student will participate in generating patient-derived models from patient-derived surgical tumor specimen and interrogate the tumor-associated immune landscape. The student will participate in screening patients and consenting patients for donating tissue and blood, collecting samples from the OR, processing surgical samples for -omics analyses (including next-generation-sequencing, single cell RNA seq, ATAC seq, and TCR sequencing), logging patient information including treatment information, generating in vitro (2D/3D-spheroid models) and in vivo models of brain tumors, and analyses of the immune cells within the tumor and the blood. Due to its focus on patients and clinical data this project builds on close interactions with surgeons, neurooncologists and immunologists, and is therefore especially relevant for medical students interested in these fields.

If you are interested in joining our group, please send a single introductory paragraph and your CV to Felicia Beppu (news2me@stanford.edu) and cc Dr. Claudia Petritsch (cpetri@stanford.edu)