Ruth Verstraten, PhD (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Ruth studied molecular biology in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Then moved to the United Kingdom and did a Ph.D. in the biology of cervical cancer at the University of Cambridge. She joined Anne’s lab at Imperial College London and has now moved with her to Mount Sinai. She is interested in understanding the mechanisms underlying uveal melanoma progression. She performs functional studies of many genes found by Anne’s group to be involved in the development and progression of uveal melanoma, such as SF3B1, BAP1 and PRAME.

Jaqueline Frost (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Jacqueline completed her PhD in Human Genetics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa). She has an interest in the genetics of autoimmune diseases. During her PhD she investigated the role of altered Wnt pathway gene expression in the pathogenesis of skin fibrosis in systemic sclerosis. Her current projects are aimed at elucidating the genomic mechanisms responsible for the development of Psoriasis and Psoriatic arthritis. Specifically, she is interested in identifying miRNAs, targets and their functional regulatory networks in order to understand their role in the development of psoriatic disease.

Greicy Goto (Research Staff)

Greicy works on Uveal melanoma (UM), a malignant tumor of the eye leading to metastases. The majority of UMs are characterized by an oncogenic or loss of function mutations in genes including: GNAQ, GNA11, BAP1, SF3B1 and EIF1AX. Greicy studies the circulating free DNA in aqueous humor and serum from patients with UM to detect mutations and other molecular alterations. This has the potential to develop into prognostic markers and therapeutic signatures.

Rittika Pandya (Bioinformatician)

As a Bioinformatician, Rittika runs various Bioinformatics analysis on Next Generation Sequencing Data that provide vast amounts of Biological information from activities such as gene expression profiling and protein expression. She is particularly interested in the creation of efficient data algorithms and high throughput bioinformatics pipelines, which can be easily modifiable to generate various statistical models. The analytical models can then be used to gain insight into the affected pathways in cancer genomics and autoimmune disorders.

Neha Mani (Hunter College High School Student)

Neha is interested in exploring more efficient methods of de novo mutation filtration via software. She is also interested in creating a bayesian network for determining the linkage of genes to psoriasis based on de novo mutations and where these genes are expressed.