School of Medicine
Showing 1-10 of 33 Results
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Michitaka Nakano
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Hematology
Current Research and Scholarly Interests Understanding of tumor biology using cancer organoid from the clinical view point.
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Yusuke Nakauchi
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stanford Cancer Center
Current Research and Scholarly Interests From 2005 to 2010, my work as a clinical hematology fellow allowed me to experience first-hand how scientific advances that started in a laboratory can transform the lives of patients. While many of my patients were cured of their disease with allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, underscoring the importance of anti-tumor immunotherapy in eradicating leukemia, I witnessed face-to-face their suffering from the long-term consequence of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). This experience was ultimately what drove me to engage in research to discover novel therapies. For this reason, I embarked on a PhD program in 2010 to design antibody therapy to (i) target GVHD and (ii) target hematological malignancies. Under the mentorship of Professor Hiromitsu Nakauchi at the University of Tokyo, an international leader in hematopoiesis, I developed allele-specific anti-human leukocyte antigen (HLA) monoclonal antibodies for severe GVHD caused by HLA-mismatched hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (Nakauchi et al., Exp Hematol, 2015). This study was the first to find that anti-HLA antibodies can be used therapeutically against GVHD. That success gave me the motivation and confidence to further my research beyond targeting GVHD, to targeting leukemic stem cells through my current postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Professor Ravindra Majeti, Department of Hematology at Stanford University.
Many people suffer from leukemia each year, but we still don?t know how to completely cure it. Recent advances in sequencing technologies have tremendously improved our understanding of the underlying mutations that drive hematologic malignancies, although, the reality is that the majority of the mutations are not easily ?druggable? and the discovery of these mutations has not yet made a significant impact in patient outcomes. I view this perhaps the most crucial challenges facing a translational cancer researcher like myself. My current research is a major step toward my long term goal to make personalized medicine a reality for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and other hematologic malignancies. Although my research is focused on targeting Ten-Eleven Translocation methylcytosine dioxygenase-2 (TET2) mutations, I anticipate it will lead to a better understanding of the cell context requirement for TET2 mutations in AML and help identify the critical cells to target to both prevent the development of de novo leukemia and halt relapse. It may also prove of value to understanding of the biology of a range of other cancers. -
Manjari Narayan
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics
Bio Manjari Narayan is a postdoctoral research scholar in the School of Medicine. Her current research interests combine high dimensional statistics, network science & statistical causal inference methods to analyze changes in brain networks either longitudinally or due to experimental perturbations. She received a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Rice University in 2016 under the supervision of Dr. Genevera Allen and a B.S in Electrical Engineering from UIUC in 2007. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar in Psychiatry under the mentorship of Amit Etkin. Her dissertation work has been recognized by numerous student paper awards including the 2016 ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Award from the International Biometrics Society and the 2013 best paper travel award in Pattern Recognition in Neuroimaging.
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Zui Narita
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Psychiatry
Bio Zui is a Board Certified Psychiatrist of Japan, who is interested in two major research topics. First, Zui is eager to understand how brain stimulation techniques (e.g., TMS, DBS, and tDCS) might improve the functions and symptoms in psychiatric disorders. Second, Zui wishes to know how biological outcomes such as brain images may predict the onset and severity of mental disorders, in the context of biomarkers for these conditions. Thus, his postgraduate training has laid the foundation for these goals. During his time in Japan, Zui conducted clinical trials that examined the effect of tDCS in patients with schizophrenia. After coming to the US, he learned advanced statistical methods in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Zui joined the Brain Stimulation Lab in 2020 and is currently engaged in clinical trials for OCD and bipolar disorder.
