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 | Academic Tree
Dr. Viswanathan is a physician-scientist 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
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).
Jiao Li, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
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
Stephen Tang, B.S.
Research Associate
Hometown: Virginia Beach, VA
Profiles: LinkedIn | Academic Tree
Stephen received a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 2018. While there, he worked as an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Dr. Katerina Politi studying the sensitivity of EGFR-mutated lung cancers to tyrosine kinase inhibitors. As a research associate in the Viswanathan lab, Stephen is working to identify therapeutic strategies to target transcriptional and splicing-related aberrations in genitourinary cancers.
Emma Garner, B.S.
Research Associate
Hometown: Sandown, NH
Profiles: LinkedIn
Emma graduated from the University of Maine in 2019, summa cum laude, with a B.S. in Biological Sciences. While there, she worked as an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Dr. Kristy Townsend studying sympathetic synaptic connections in adipose tissue to further understand how defective neural communication causes metabolic disorders. As a research associate in the Viswanathan lab, Emma is working to develop new models to study rare genitourinary cancers.
Nebiyou Metaferia, B.A.
Research Associate
Hometown: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Profiles: LinkedIn
Nebiyou graduated from Williams College in 2019 with a double major in biology and computer science. At Williams, he worked in the lab of Dr. Derek Dean investigating the seizure inducing locus julius seizure(jus) in D. melanogaster and the genetic interaction of jus with other loci in the seizure inducing pathway. In his spare time, he worked on various mini-projects in computer science and loves solving algorithmic problems on Hackerrank. As a research associate in the Viswanathan lab, Nebiyou is working to study novel vulnerabilities in castration-resistant prostate cancer.