Aileen Ugurbil Awarded NRSA F30 Fellowship

Tri-I student Aileen Ugurbil was recently awarded an NIH National Research Service Award (NRSA) F30 Fellowship from the National Cancer Institute. The NRSA F30 Fellowship supports the research and clinical training of promising predoctoral students in a combined MD/PhD or other dual doctoral degree training programs that aspire to become clinician-scientists. 

 

Aileen's F30 will support her research in the lab of her sponsor, Dr. Junyue Cao, at The Rockefeller University, where she is in her fifth year of the PhD phase of the program. Her project is titled "Gene Regulatory Mechanisms of Site-Specific Metastasis and Heterogeneity in High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer." Aileen explains, "High-grade serous ovarian cancer is one of the most lethal gynecologic malignancies. Its genome is massively rearranged, but those copy number changes don't fully explain how the tumors behave. Foldback-inversion tumors tend to evade the immune system, while HRD-Dup tumors often have better outcomes. Our project uses single-cell ATAC sequencing to find the transcription factor programs behind those differences. We do this with EasySci-ATAC, a combinatorial-indexing based method developed in our lab. We're also looking for programs that shift as tumors metastasize to different anatomic sites."