News & Announcements
Here are some of the recent happenings in our program.
Congratulations to Pathobiology graduate student, PhD Candidate, Si-Sim Kang, MS!
Si-Sim Kang was recently awarded a PhRMA pre-doctoral fellowship grant for drug delivery. The PhRMA Foundation awarded 21 early-career researchers a total of nearly $1.7 million in 2024 fellowships and grants focused on drug discovery and drug delivery research.
Si-Sim is a PhD candidate in the Pathobiology program. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in life science and Master’s from National Taiwan University. Her journey began with significant contributions during her Master’s, exploring Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapy in Primary Biliary Cholangitis. Si-Sim’s expertise extends further back to their undergraduate years, marked by impactful research on the role of Granzyme B in Regulatory T Cells and contributions to the study of X-Linked Inhibitor of Apoptotic Protein in the non-canonical NF-Kb activation signaling pathway of necroptosis. Currently, Si-Sim’s work focuses on immunoengineering methods for cancer therapy. She developed a platform to use nanoparticles to expand human antigen-specific CD4 T cells for cancer therapy. Si-Sim enjoys reading, hiking, traveling, and playing piano in her free time.
Visit link for more details about the PhRMA Foundation: PhRMA Foundation Awards $1.7M in 2024 Drug Discovery and Delivery Fellowships and Grants — PhRMA Foundation
Congratulations once Again to Pathobiology graduate student, PhD Candidate, Amanda Loftin, DVM!!
Amanda was selected as a winner of the Empower Your Pitch! Competition hosted by PHutures. Amanda received the PHutures Award for Outstanding Creativity in Research Communication for her 3-minute presentation titled: "A Fishy Solution to the Organ Shortage Crisis". Congratulations to Amanda, for this extraordinary achievement, demonstrating your excellent communication skills as well as sharing the impact you and your team are making in the important field of organ transplant.
Congratulations to Pathobiology graduate student, PhD Candidate, Amanda Loftin, DVM!!
Amanda was selected to receive awards from two of the premier societies in the field of transplantation. She received the American Society of Reconstructive Transplantation (ASRT) Travel Grant Award for her abstract entitled “Autologous Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation Prevents Antibody-Mediated Rejection in a Swine Model of Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation”. ASRT Travel Grants are competitive and only awarded to the top two abstracts presented at the ASRT 2022 Biennial Meeting. Amanda was also a recipient of an American Society of Transplantation (AST) Travel Grant Award and was selected to attend the AST Fellows Symposium on Transplantation from September 23-25, 2022 in Grapevine, Tx
AMANDA LOFTIN, D.V.M.
Amanda Loftin is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) and PhD candidate in the Pathobiology Graduate Program working to apply her specialized training in animal medicine to human disease focused research. Her research aims to increase the supply of transplantable organs by extending organ preservation times. To do this, she uses an integrated approach that combines subzero temperatures, supercooling, and bio-inspired cryoprotectants. While under the mentorship of Dr. Gerald Brandacher in the Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation (VCA) laboratory, Amanda has established a pre-clinical large animal renal autotransplantation model and developed ex-vivo machine perfusion protocols which she uses for her investigations. She is instrumental in the VCA laboratory’s efforts to develop organ preservation and transport technologies. Before joining the VCA lab, Amanda did research at UCLA where she developed animal models of orthopedic implant infections and pioneered new implant coatings to prevent surgical infections. As a doctorate student at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine she received multiple prestigious awards including a T35 Short-Term Institutional Training Grant and a Cancer Research Training Award from the National Cancer Institute. These awards supported her studies on satellite muscle regeneration at Stanford University School of Medicine as well as her research investigating the immunopathogenesis of HIV in the Laboratory of Viral Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.
Congratulations to Pathobiology graduate, Monali Praharaj, MS, PhD!
Monali has been selected to receive an AACR-Doreen J. Putrah Cancer Research Foundation Scholar-in-Training Award from The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) based on the quality of her award application and abstract entitled “Glutamine blockade via prodrug JHU083 reprograms immunosuppressive tumor associated macrophages (TAMs) and drives tumor immunity in urologic cancers.” Scholar-in-Training Awards are competitive and are presented to those with high-quality abstracts and applications from a large candidate pool. Monali is invited to present her work at the AACR Annual Meeting as well as attend a Scholar-in-Training Award Reception April 8-13, 2022 in New Orleans, LA.
MONALI PRAHARAJ, M.S., Ph.D. (April, 2023)
Monali Praharaj comes from Mumbai, India. She completed her bachelor's in biotechnology in 2014 and worked as a research fellow in Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay studying antibiotic resistance in Mycobacterium spp. With an immense interest in microbiology and immunology she joined the master’s program in Molecular microbiology & Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2016. During her thesis research she worked in the tuberculosis research center to genetically re-engineer BCG as a potent immunotherapeutic tool for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer. Highly motivated during her time to learn more and understand immune mediated pathological pathways in cancer she matriculated into the Pathobiology program in 2018. She studies the value of novel immunotherapeutic interventions targeting immunosuppressive myeloid cells in urologic cancers under the co-mentorship of Dr. Jelani Zarif Ph.D. and Andrew Pardoll M.D., Ph.D. After earning her PhD, she is interested in continuing her work in cancer immunotherapy in an industrial setting. In her free time, she enjoys playing ping pong, cooking, hiking, exploring, and travelling with family and friends.
Upcoming Events
Past Events
Pathobiology Thesis Seminar
Speaker: Andrew Wilson (Ph.D. Candidate)
Title: "Characterization of Inclusion Body Myositis Progenitors Cells using in vitro methodologies and Next Generation Sequencing"
Date/Time: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 @ 10:00am EST
Place: Rangos 590 (Use 4th floor bridge entrance from WBSB 3rd
flr to access 5th floor from lobby stairwell)
Advisor: Dr. Tom Lloyd
-Or-
Join via the Following Zoom Access Link:
https://jhjhm.zoom.us/j/92106728352?pwd=sPRosCjtuwAAHAPusvnIls3T0IHRjb.1
Pathobiology Thesis Seminar
Speaker: Alex Beaver (Ph.D. Candidate)
Title: "Extravascular spaces are the primary reservoir of antigenic variation in Trypanosoma brucei infection"
Date/Time: Monday, June 24, 2024 @ 2:00pm EST
Bloomberg School of Public Health, W1020
Advisor: Dr. Monica Mugnier
-Or-
Join via the Following Zoom Access Link:
https://jhjhm.zoom.us/j/93853412300?pwd=v3VbrAQZneiJn5ICRxUzVvKPbNmNC1.1
Pathobiology Thesis Seminar
Speaker: Poppy Wang (Ph.D. Candidate)
Title: “Dissecting functional diversities of human sensory neuron subsets to develop a new humanized platform for pain therapy”
Date/Time: Thursday, March 28, 2024 @ 1:00PM EST
Place: Wood Basic Science Auditorium (Ground floor PCTB/WBSB)
Advisors: Dr. Gabsang Lee and Dr. Xinzhong Dong
Pathobiology Thesis Seminar
Speaker: Nathan Crilly, DVM (Ph.D. Candidate)
Title: “Sleeping Hearts: Investigating intracardiac host-pathogen interactions in a mouse model of African Trypanosomiasis”
Date/Time: Thursday, March 28, 2024 @ 10:00AM EST
Place: Wood Basic Science Auditorium (Ground floor PCTB/WBSB)
Advisor: Dr. Monica Mugnier
Pathobiology Thesis Seminar
Speaker: Danielle Nicklas (Ph.D. Candidate)
Title: "Mycobacteroides abscessus in the Twenty-First Century: Response to novel agents and mycomembrane stress in biofilms"
Date/Time: Friday, March 22, 2024 @ 2:00pm EST
Place: CRB II, Rm. 111 (Behind Me Latte)
Advisor: Dr. Gyanu Lamichhane
Pathobiology Thesis Seminar
Speaker: Jina Park (Ph.D. Candidate)
Title: "MYC plus class IIa HDAC inhibition potentiates mitochondrial dysfunction in non-small cell lung cancer"
Date/Time: Friday, January 12, 2024 at 2:00pm EST
Place: Owens Auditorium (Between CRB I & II)
Advisor: Dr. Stephen Baylin
Pathobiology Thesis Seminar
Speaker: Harley Harris (Ph.D. Candidate)
Title: "Analysis of the Role of caeA in Rifampin Tolerance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis"
Date/Time: Friday, July 28, 2023 at 1:30pm EST
Place: Owens Auditorium (Between CRB I & II)
Advisor: Dr. Petros Karakousis
Past Awards and Publications
Here are some of our students' accomplishments.
Congratulations to Pathobiology graduate, Carli Jones, Ph.D.!
Carli was chosen for the P.E.O. Scholar Award based on her scholarly excellence, academic achievement, and career goals. Carli is studying the relationship between radiation exposure and radiotherapy and the gastrointestinal microbiome. She currently aspires to work for NASA and to study the effects of spaceflight on the human body, and particularly in the areas of immunology and the gut-brain axis.
https://www.peointernational.org/about-peo-scholar-awards
Carli is from Hillsborough, New Jersey and received her Bachelors of Science in Biology with a minor in Bioengineering from Lafayette College in spring 2017. At Lafayette, Carli worked with Dr. Robert Kurt on projects involving the TLR4 signaling pathway. Since matriculating in the Pathobiology program in fall 2017, she joined the lab of Dr. Karen Sfanos. In collaboration with Dr. Sfanos and Dr. Catherine Davis, she was awarded a seed grant from Space@Hopkins in 2018 to study the effects of cosmic radiation on the gut microbiome, and the effects of the radiation on the gut-brain axis. Now, Carli’s work focuses on the effects of radiotherapy for prostate cancer on the GI microbiota and how different microbiome compositions influence treatment response. She has also developed an interest in bioinformatics and sequence analysis through this work. After graduation, Carli aspires work for NASA and study the effects of spaceflight on the human body. In her free time, Carli enjoys fitness, cooking, coffee, and breweries. She has also fostered 8 dogs and 6 cats through City Dogs Rescue throughout her time in Baltimore.
Congratulations to Pathobiology graduate, Dr. Zoila Areli Lopez Bujanda, Ph.D.!
Areli has 2 recently published papers, in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer as well as Nature Cancer!
Zoila A Lopez-Bujanda, Aleksandar Obradovic, Thomas R Nirschl, Laura Crowley, Rodney Maced, Alexandros Papachristodoulou, Timothy O'Donnell, Uri Laserson, Jelani C Zarif, Ran Reshef, Tiezheng Yuan, Mithil K Soni, Emmanuel S Antonarakis, Michael C Haffner, H Benjamin Larman, Michael M Shen, Pawel Muranski & Charles G Drake. TGM4: an immunogenic prostate-restricted antigen. J Immunother Cancer. 2021 Jun.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34193566/
Zoila A. Lopez-Bujanda, Michael C. Haffner, Matthew G. Chaimowitz, Nivedita Chowdhury, Nicholas J. Venturini, Radhika A. Patel, Aleksandar Obradovic, Corey S. Hansen, Joanna Jacków, Janielle P. Maynard, Karen S. Sfanos, Cory Abate-Shen, Charles J. Bieberich, Paula J. Hurley, Mark J. Selby, Alan J. Korman, Angela M. Christiano, Angelo M. De Marzo & Charles G. Drake. Castration-mediated IL-8 promotes myeloid infiltration and prostate cancer progression. Nature Cancer. 2021 19, July.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-021-00227-3
Zoila Areli Lopez-Bujanda (Areli), Ph.D.
Areli is a 2020 graduate of the Pathobiology PhD Graduate Program. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry and her M.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Sonora in Mexico before coming to the United States to work as a research assistant in the Laboratory of Dr. Saraswati Sukumar, at Johns Hopkins. After two years in the laboratory of Dr. Sukumar, where she helped develop a serum-based assay to monitor patients with breast cancer, Areli decided to stay at Johns Hopkins for her PhD studies and later joined the laboratory of Dr. Charles Drake. In the Drake Lab her work, initially aimed at discovering novel antigens for prostate cancer vaccines, revealed that prostate tumor epithelial cells secrete high levels of IL-8 following androgen deprivation leading to the establishment of a suppressive tumor microenvironment. It was during these studies that she became fundamentally interested in understanding how external cues modulate the immune response. For her postdoctoral training in Dr. Dan Littman laboratory, she has directed her focus towards understanding how environmental cues interact with neurons and what are the communication networks leading to variable immune responses in different microbial contexts.
Congratulations to Pathobiology alumni, Daniel Monaco, Ph.D., Tom Nirschl, Ph.D., and Audrey Knight, Ph.D.!
Our Pathobiology students' work, along with other collaborators, was recently published in Nature Communications!
Daniel R. Monaco, Brandon M. Sie, Thomas R. Nirschl, Audrey C. Knight, Hugh A. Sampson, Anna Nowak-Wegrzyn, Robert A. Wood, Robert G. Hamilton, Pamela A. Frischmeyer-Guerrerio & H. Benjamin Larman. Profiling serum antibodies with a pan allergen phage library identifies key wheat allergy epitopes. Nature Communications January 22, 2021, volume 12, Article number: 379 (2021)
https://www.nature.com/article...
Congratulations to Pathobiology graduate, Areli Lopez, Ph.D.!
Areli's work was recently published in OncoImmunology!
Zoila A. Lopez-Bujanda, Matthew G. Chaimowitz, Todd D. Armstrong, Jeremy B. Foote, Leisha A. Emens & Charles Drake. Robust antigen-specific CD8 T cell tolerance to a model prostate cancer neoantigen. OncoImmunology, 9:1, 1809926, DOI: 10.1080/2162402X.2020.1809926
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2162402X.2020.1809926
Zoila Areli Lopez-Bujanda (Areli), Ph.D. (Graduate, Dec. 2020)
Areli is a PhD candidate in the Pathobiology program at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry and her M.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Sonora in Mexico before coming to the United States to work as a research assistant in the Laboratory of Dr. Saraswati Sukumar, at Johns Hopkins. After two years in the laboratory of Dr. Sukumar, where she helped develop a serum-based assay to monitor patients with breast cancer, Areli decided to stay at Johns Hopkins for her PhD studies and later joined the laboratory of Dr. Charles Drake, where she worked on elucidating an important mechanism of immunosuppression in prostate cancer that led to the initiation of a clinical trial to treat this condition. Later this year, Areli will join the laboratory of Dr. Dan Littman for a postdoctoral fellowship.
Congratulations to Pathobiology graduate, Janelle Montagne, M.S., Ph.D.!
Janelle's work was recently published in The Lancet!
Janelle M. Montagne, Xuwen Alice Zheng, Iago Pinal-Fernandez, Jose C. Milisenda, Lisa Christopher-Stine, Thomas E. Lloyd, Andrew L. Mammen and H. Benjamin Larman. Ultra-efficient sequencing of T Cell receptor repertoires reveals shared responses in muscle from patients with Myositis. The Lancet, Vol 59, September 3, 2020, 102972 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2020.102972
Janelle Montagne, M.S., Ph.D. (May, 2020)
After earning her Bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Lafayette College, Janelle studied mechanisms of autoimmune rheumatic disease in the Division of Rheumatology here at Hopkins. During that time, she earned her Masters of Science in biotechnology/bioinformatics. She enrolled in the Pathobiology program in 2015 and subsequently joined the laboratory of Dr. H. Benjamin Larman, where she established projects fusing her interests in T cell biology, biotechnology development, and bioinformatics. During her PhD training, Janelle successfully developed an ultra-efficient approach for T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire sequencing, enabling her to interrogate the complexity of T cell responses in muscle from patients with myositis. She further integrated her TCR sequencing method into a high-throughput flow cytometry assay for the detection of antigen-specific T cells. Throughout her training, Janelle was actively engaged with the Pathobiology program, serving as Chief Graduate Student from 2017-2018. She is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow in oncology under the mentorship of Dr. Elana Fertig and Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee integrating computational, technological, and experimental approaches to understanding mechanisms of response and resistance to cancer immunotherapy.
Congratulations to Lionel Chia, Ph.D.!
For his work presented on how HMGA1 induces FGF19 to foster tumor-stromal cell crosstalk and drive tumor progression in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, Lionel Chia received the AACR-Doreen J. Putrah Cancer Research Foundation Scholar-in-Training Award. Lionel presented at the 2020 AACR Annual Meeting, which took place virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scholar-in-Training Awards are competitive and are presented to those with high-quality abstracts and applications from a large candidate pool.
Lionel is a 4th year PhD student in the Graduate Program in Pathobiology under the mentorship of Dr. Linda Resar, whose laboratory focuses on studying molecular mechanisms leading to cancer, blood diseases, sickle cell anemia, hemophilia and other coagulopathies. Lionel is studying the role of the chromosomal architectural protein HMGA1 in prostate and pancreatic cancer. He hopes that by understanding more about HMGA1, he would be able to develop additional therapies against HMGA1 and its associated pathways to treat cancer. Outside of the laboratory, Lionel’s interests include playing his guitar, running, and spending time with friends.