Meet the Team

 

Hideo Watanabe, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor of Medicine, Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine and Assistant Professor, Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Hideo Watanabe completed his medical degree, internal medicine residency and pulmonology fellowship in Keio University School of Medicine in Japan. During his clinical training in pulmonology, he cared for many lung cancer patients confronting the end-stages of their diseases. This led him to pursue research training, where he studied the role of epigenetic modification in the growth of lung cancer cells at Graduate School of Medicine in Keio University. After witnessing the emergence of a new paradigm of targeted therapeutics led by genome discoveries in cancer, he went on to train at the laboratory of Dr. Meyerson, a world leader in cancer genome analysis, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute. He joined faculty in Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to establish a highly collaborative program that utilizes functional genomics and state-of-the-art technologies to characterize various cellular lineages in normal lung as well as in lung cancer subtypes, and identify and elucidate the mechanism of the lineage programs that are aberrantly fixated in lung cancer.

Chandra Kishore, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow in the Watanabe Lab. He completed his Master of Science degree from Hindu College, University of Delhi and PhD in Cancer Biology from IIT Madras, where he studied the roles of Wnt signaling in epithelial mesenchymal transition in colorectal cancer. After his one year of postdoctoral training at UC Irvine Medical Center in California, he joined as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. His current research interests are epigenetics, neuroendocrine cancers and cancer neuroscience.

 

 

Reshmee Bhattacharya, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow in the Watanabe lab. She obtained B.Sc from University of Delhi and M.Sc in Biochemistry from Jamia Hamdard University before completing her PhD in Biomedical Sciences at Ambedkar Center for Biomedical Research, University of Delhi, where she studied structural and functional consequences of AGE-induced covalent modification of proteins and preventive strategies. Her current research interests are lineage plasticity under immunomodulatory treatment in lung cancer.

 

 

Divagar Thirumoorthy, B. Eng is a Master’s student in Biomedical Science at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Divagar obtained his undergraduate study in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at National University of Singapore, working on designing a novel hydrogel system to recapitulate tumor microenvironment interactions for accurate drug screening. He is currently studying the roles of MYC family members in neuroendocrine differentiation in SCLC. He in interested in pursuing PhD and academic career as a hybrid computational and molecular biologist.

 

Eduard Drizik, MD is a resident physician at Mount Sinai Hospital and a member of the lab since 2023. Dr. Drizik received Bachelor’s degree from University of Massachusetts Amherst and Master’s degree from Boston University before completing his MD at Wayne State University. He has extensive research experience working in Dr. Spira’s lab at Boston University. His current project seeks to understand early stage lung carcinogenesis utilizing spatial genomics approach. He received Trainee Innovation Idea Award from Mount Sinai Innovation Partners in 2023.

 

 

Alumni of the Laboratory

Yang Tian, PhD was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Watanabe lab. She received her PhD degree from Tsinghua University in China. Her PhD research focused on mechanism studies in the fields of tumor microenvironment, tumor metastasis, combinational ant-cancer therapy and tumor early detection. She studied the molecular basis of cancer heterogeneity and continues her work on lineage heterogeneity and plasticity of lung cancer in the Watanabe lab. She obtained a research grant from Lung Cancer Research Foundation for her original project.

 

Ranran Kong, MD is a postdoctoral fellow in the Watanabe lab. He received his MD from China Medical University. In China, he is an attending thoracic surgeon in the Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University. He has been a surgeon there for eight years with extensive experience in procedures and surgeries for lung and esophageal cancer patients. Dr. Kong spent one year researching at the University of Miami. He was a member of Professor Liu’s research team in the Department of Surgery. His work at the University of Miami elucidates the role of Notch1 in melanoma and other types of cancer. His studied the role of NKX2-1 in small cell lung cancer (AJRCCM 2022).

 

Douglas Mansell, PhD was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Watanabe lab. He received his PhD degree from Howard University in Washington D.C.. His PhD research focused on the effects of Vitamin D on cAMP production in Airway epithelia and differential transcriptomic expression in asthmatic epithelia in pediatric patients. He then completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University, in which he investigated the effects of circulating vitamin D levels on quality of life in lean vs. obese asthmatics. He worked on epigenomic profiles non-small cell lung cancers in an effort to develop novel therapeutics that target specific cancer subtypes.

 

Ayushi Patel, MS was a Research Associate in the Watanabe lab. She joined the lab in 2017 as a Master’s student in Biomedical Science with the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research as part of Dr. Watanabe’s lab focuses on the role of MYC family members that serve as a lineage specific factor in small cell lung cancer (Science Advances 2021). She graduated from the University of Rochester with a dual degree in Bachelor’s of Science in Biochemistry and a Bachelor’s of Arts in Psychology. She began her career as a clinical research assistant at Supratech Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad India, where she developed and validated assays for clinical screenings for cancer patients. Ayushi is currently a PhD student at NYU Vilcek Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences.

 

Feng Jiang, BS was a Research Associate in the Watanabe lab. He joined the lab in 2020 after earning his Bachelor of Science in Biology & Society from Cornell University. He completed his senior thesis from the department of plants biology at Cornell investigating the effect of previously uncharacterized disease resistance gene on the pathogen defense response and abiotic stress tolerance of plants Arabidopsis. He is also the founder of the Ithaca Health Initiative, which aims to expose students from underrepresented minorities to a variety of healthy living aspects. He is currently a senior research associate at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Feng hopes to pursue PhD in the future.

 

Sarah Karam was a research intern in the Watanabe lab. She joined the lab in the summer of 2019 and has continued her research during her school year. She is currently a senior in Bergen County Academies. She was a finalist on the Regeneron ISEF 2020 competition for the study “Exploring the Effects of GRN on Chemotherapy Response in Small Cell Lung Cancer.”, which was conducted in the Watanabe laboratory in collaboration with Jun Zhu’s laboratory in Genetics and Genomic Sciences. Sarah is currently an undergraduate student at Cornell University majoring Biological Engineering.

 

Rafal Krzysztoń, PhD was a joint postdoctoral research fellow in the Watanabe lab and Eric Brouzes lab in Stony Brook University. He works on developing a new microfluidic device to accomplish single cell epigenomic analysis on a small quantity sample. He is currently a senior postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University.

 

 

Takashi Sato2Takashi Sato, MD, PhD was a postdoctoral research fellow in Watanabe Laboratory from 2016-2019. He completed his medical degree in Keio University School of Medicine, and worked as a pulmonologist and treated a number of lung cancer patients in Japan. Being interested in pathogenesis of lung cancer, he went on to study at National Cancer Center Research Institute in Tokyo, Japan. In his PhD work there, Dr. Sato elucidated that DNA methylation alterations at precancerous stage are inherited by established lung adenocarcinoma, and consequently determine tumor aggressiveness and patient outcomes. He studied a novel neural lineage subtype of lung squamous cell cancer (Cancer Res 2019) in our lab. He is currently a Associate Professor at Kitasato University in Japan continuing his research.

 

Maya Fridrikh, BS was a Research Associate in the Watanabe lab from 2017 to 2019. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Biophysics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She spent her summers as an undergraduate at Lariat Biosciences developing a device for liquid biopsy. She worked as a microfluidics engineer and took part in designing and constructing a compact constant-pressure device which would diagnose cancer SNPs in cancer’s earliest stages. Her work in the Watanabe laboratory included profiling lung tumor cells to compare the landscapes with those of the tumor immune compartment as well as studying a lineage transcription factor in lung adenocarcinoma. Maya is currently a Senior Associate Researcher in the Genetics and Genomic Sciences Department in Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Michael William, MD received his Bachelors of Science degree in Biology from University of North Texas and MD from American University of Antigua. Michael assisted the members in Watanabe laboratory with generating next-generation sequencing libraries and performing other molecular biology experiments. Michael is currently a resident in Internal Medicine.

Stephanie Tuminello, MS was a Research Associate in the Watanabe lab from 2015-2017.  Her research as part of the Watanabe lab focused on the development of single cell histone modification profiling technology and studying epigenetics of lung cancer.  She received her Bachelors of Science Degree from Stony Brook University with a major in Genetics and Developmental Biology. Stephanie began working in research as an undergraduate at the Centers for Infectious Disease at Stony Brook University, where she helped investigate proteins of the yersenia bacteria, the infectious agent responsible for the plague. She earned Master’s degree at the CUNY School of Public Health pursing a degree in Biostatistics. She obtained PhD student at NYU School of Medicine, Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences and currently an Instructor in the Department of Surgery at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

 

Past Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) students

Sumayya Shurovi Fordham University

Karina Grullon-Perez The Penn State University, Schreyer Honors College