PEOPLE

Viswanathan Lab Team

We are a young and vibrant lab and seek to grow our team with creative and enthusiastic individuals from diverse prior backgrounds. I am deeply committed to ensuring rigorous training, productive mentorship, and an inspired scientific experience for all members of the lab. Research has borne out the value of mentorship in academia and I have been fortunate to benefit from fantastic mentorship as an undergraduate, graduate student, and postdoctoral fellow. I am committed to the mentorship and success of all trainees in their next endeavor, whether that be in academia, industry, or another path.

Principal Investigator

Srinivas R. Viswanathan, M.D., Ph.D.
Principal Investigator

Hometown: Tenafly, NJ
Twitter | PubMed

Dr. Viswanathan is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an attending medical oncologist in the Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University. He subsequently received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School, doing his graduate work in the lab of Dr. George Q. Daley and his medical training in the Harvard Medical School/MIT Health Sciences and Technology program. He completed residency training in Internal Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. His postdoctoral fellowship was with Dr. Matthew Meyerson at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Shatha AbuHammad, B.D.S, M.S., Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Postdoctoral fellowship, DoD Kidney Cancer Research Program

Hometown: Amman, Jordan
Profiles: Google Scholar | LinkedIn

Shatha received a B.D.S degree in Dentistry and M.S. degree in Pharmacology from the University of Jordan. She then received her Ph.D from the University of Melbourne, working in the lab of Professor Grant McArthur at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center, where she stayed on as a postdoctoral researcher before coming to Dana-Farber. Her work focused on studying the mechanisms of acquired-resistance to cancer therapeutics.

Selected Publications:

S. AbuHammad, et al., Regulation of PRMT5–MDM4 axis is critical in the response to CDK4/6 inhibitors in melanoma. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 116, 17990–18000 (2019).

Ziad Bakouny, M.D., M.Sc.
Postdoctoral Fellow / Medical Resident

Hometown: Beiruit, Lebanon
Profiles: Google Scholar | Twitter | LinkedIn

Ziad received his MSc degree in Biomechanics and Medical Imaging in 2016 and his MD degree in 2018 from the University of Saint-Joseph in Beirut, Lebanon. His pre-doctoral research focused on subject-specific modelling of human skeletal structures and movement using infrared and X-ray-based static and dynamic imaging. Ziad joined Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2018 to work on kidney cancer genomics and has been co-mentored by Dr. Toni Choueiri and Dr. Eliezer Van Allen. Ziad is an incoming internal medicine resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, starting June 2021.

Selected Publications:

Bakouny Z, Braun DA, Shukla SA, Pan W, Gao X, Hou Y, Flaifel A, Tang S, Bosma-Moody A, He MX, Vokes N, Nyman J, Xie W, Nassar AH, Abou Alaiwi S, Flippot R, Bouchard G, Steinharter JA, Nuzzo PV, Ficial M, Sant'Angelo M, Forman J, Berchuck JE, Dudani S, Bi K, Park J, Camp S, Sticco-Ivins M, Hirsch L, Baca SC, Wind-Rotolo M, Ross-Macdonald P, Sun M, Lee GM, Chang SL, Wei XX, McGregor BA, Harshman LC, Genovese G, Ellis L, Pomerantz M, Hirsch MS, Freedman ML, Atkins MB, Wu CJ, Ho TH, Linehan WM, McDermott DF, Heng DYC, Viswanathan SR, Signoretti S, Van Allen EM, Choueiri TK. Integrative molecular characterization of sarcomatoid and rhabdoid renal cell carcinoma. Nat Commun. 2021 Feb 5;12(1):808. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-21068-9.
Bakouny Z, Sadagopan A, Ravi P, Metaferia NY, Li J, Tang S, Denize T, Garner ER, Gao X, Hirsch L, Steinharter JA, Bouchard G, Walton E, Labaki C, Dudani S, Gan C-L, Sethunath V, Imamovic A, Ricker C, Vokes NI, Nyman J, Park J, Hirsch MS, Haq R, Mary Lee G-S, McGregor BA, Chang SL, Feldman AS, Wu CJ, McDermott DF, Heng DYC, Signoretti S, Van Allen EM, Choueiri TK, Viswanathan SR. Integrative Clinical and Molecular Characterization of Translocation Renal Cell Carcinoma. bioRxiv. 2021 Apr 15. doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.14.439908

Bingchen Li, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Shandong, China
Profiles: LinkedIn

Bingchen received his B.S in Chemistry from Shandong Agricultural University. His undergraduate research was focused on developing electrochemical and photoelectrochemical biosensors. He completed his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University. His doctoral work, in the lab of Erwin London, focused on the effects of asymmetry on liposomal drug loading and delivery efficiency.

Selected Publications:

Li, Bingchen, and Erwin London. Preparation and drug entrapment properties of asymmetric liposomes containing cationic and anionic lipids. Langmuir 36, no. 42 (2020): 12521-12531.

Jiao Li, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Postdoctoral fellowship, National Cancer Center
Hometown: Changzhi, China
Profiles: Google Scholar

Jiao received her B.S in Resources and Development of Traditional Chinese Medicine from Shanxi Agricultural University in 2013. Her undergraduate research was focused on the antibacterial effects of Paulownia flower extract. She completed her Ph.D. from Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019. Her doctoral work, in the lab of Hongjie Yao, focused on the effects of epigenetics and higher-order chromatin architecture on gene regulation and cell fate determination.

Selected Publications:

Jiao Li#, Kaimeng Huang#, Gongcheng Hu#, Isaac A. Babarinde, Yaoyi Li, Xiaotao Dong, Yu-Sheng Chen, Liping Shang, Wenjing Guo, Junwei Wang, Zhaoming Chen, Andrew P. Hutchins, Yun-Gui Yang, Hongjie Yao*: An alternative CTCF isoform antagonizes canonical CTCF occupancy and changes chromatin architecture to promote apoptosis. Nature Communications, 2019.

Research Associates

Usman Ali Ahmed, B.S.
Research Associate

Hometown: Reading, MA
Profiles: LinkedIn

Ali graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston with a B.S. in Biology. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Jill Macoska studying novel urinary RNA biomarkers useful for renal cancer diagnosis and prognosis.

Danny Gallant, B.S.
Research Associate

Hometown: Boulder, CO
Profiles: LinkedIn

Danny received a B.S. degree from Wake Forest University where he majored in chemistry with a concentration of medicinal chemistry & drug discovery. He worked as a research assistant in Dr. Ulrich Bierbach's lab at Wake Forest where he studied platinum acridine drugs, a novel platinum chemotherapy agent which is being investigated in order to treat breast and lung cancers. Specifically, Danny investigated molecular mechanisms behind drug resistance and epigenetic silencing mechanisms in non-small cell lung cancer and triple negative breast cancer.

Undergraduates

Ananthan Sadagopan
Undergraduate Research Associate

Hometown: Westborough, MA
Profiles: Google Scholar | Twitter | LinkedIn

Ananthan is an undergraduate at MIT planning to major in biology. He previously worked as a research assistant in Dr. Soldano Ferrone’s lab at MGH investigating mechanisms of HLA class I downregulation in cancer cells. In the Viswanathan Lab, his current work is related to the characterization of sex-specific alterations in cancers.

Lab Alumni

Name

Marina Nogueira (mentored as postdoctoral fellow/Instructor)
Stephen Tang
Emma Garner
Vidya Sethunath
Nebiyou Metaferia
Imran Nasim