Hopper-Belmont Foundation Award Winners

Ryne Ramaker is chief hematology/oncology fellow at Duke University and enrolled in the Physician Scientist Training Program (PSTP). He has a longstanding research focus in pancreas cancer. He completed MD/PhD training via a joint Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) between the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology where his thesis work focused on high throughput screening for mechanisms of multi-drug resistance that make pancreas cancer a challenging disease to treat. At Duke, he is working under the mentorship of Drs. Chris Counter and John Strickler to develop new approaches to sequencing circulating pancreas tumor DNA in a highly sensitive manner. The ultimate goal of his work is to empower use of targeted therapy in earlier stages of pancreas cancer and develop a platform for close disease surveillance for patients undergoing treatment. As a physician-scientist, he also runs a clinic focused on treating individuals diagnosed with gastrointestinal cancers including pancreas cancer.

Dr. Alvikas: “I was born in Trakai, Lithuania and emigrated to the US as a teenager. After high school in Chicago Public School system, I received my undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and attended medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I pursued General Surgery residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and am currently a Fellow in Complex General Surgical Oncology at UPMC. The motivation for my clinical and academic work comes from deeply personal experiences with cancer. My mom’s diagnosis of breast cancer sparked my interest in medicine and led me to pursue it as a career. My grandmother was diagnosed with and died from pancreatic cancer in 2022. Witnessing this deadly disease as a family member and not a healthcare provider reinforced the my sense of urgency towards pancreatic cancer research. Innovative and ambitious research projects are necessary to improve the lives of patients affected with this disease. I hope to translate this investigation of platelet RNA signatures as an early detection method for pancreatic cancer into a clinically meaningful tool that we can use to find pancreatic cancer at an earlier stage and treat it more effectively. Under the mentorship of Dr. Randall Brand, an expert in pancreatic cancer diagnostics, the results of this study will serve as a foundation for larger future studies of biomarkers for pancreatic cancer detection.”

Hanna S. Hong is a postdoctoral associate at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Hanna holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Washington. She trained at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH as a post baccalaureate fellow and earned her PhD in Immunology at the

University of Michigan, where she studied immunometabolism. Hanna joined the laboratory of Tyler Jacks at the Koch Institute to investigate immune escape mechanisms in pancreatic cancer, with the goal of identifying actionable targets that advance the development of new, more effective therapies.

Peter Wang is a research fellow in the Center for Systems Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a research affiliate at the Broad Institute of MITand Harvard. He is particularly interestedin how nerve modulation can be leveraged to improve immune responses and seeks to identify new strategies for using neuromodulation to increasetherapeutic efficacy in patients. His current projectaims toidentify features of successful versus unsuccessful anti-tumor immune responsesusing high resolution single-cell and spatial transcriptomic approachesto investigate cancer-nerve-immune crosstalk in patient specimens and mouse models. He is also utilizing novel co-culture systems to screen for nerve type-specificsignaling that could enhanceimmune activation and minimize immune exhaustion.These studies will hopefully reveal unique neuromodulatory approaches for tuning immune responses in pancreatic cancerthat can be integrated into novel and existing therapies. Peter holds a bachelor’s degree in Human Biology, Health and Society from Cornell University. He received his PhD in Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Dr. Gamze Bildik Elcik is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Experimental Therapeutics at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Istanbul University, Turkey. She earned her Master’s degree in Reproductive Biology, continued her doctoral training in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, and received her Ph.D. from Koc University, Istanbul. In 2019, Dr. Bildik Elcik joined Dr. Robert C. Bast’s laboratory at MD Anderson Cancer Center as a postdoctoral fellow to further expand her studies in the field of pancreatic and ovarian cancers. She was awarded the TRIUMPH (Translational Research in Multi-Disciplinary Program) Postdoctoral Fellowship supported by the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas which provides continued training in clinical and translational cancer research and builds a foundation to conduct translational research. Dr. Bildik’s research interests focus on the field of oncogenic KRAS signalings and autophagy, and developing novel therapeutic combinations to find an effective way to inhibit mutant KRAS activity. Her ultimate goal is to understand autophagy-mediated drug resistance to seek more effective therapeutic interventions for patients undergoing treatment for pancreatic and low-grade serous ovarian cancer.

Laura Antonucci is a Staff Research Associate and proposed Assistant Research Scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Several key events in her personal life gave her a strong desire and commitment to pursue an academic career in the field of Cancer Research. Her

expertise in understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in cancer onset and progression was built initially during her training at the Department of Molecular Oncology at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, as a master’s degree student and, afterward, as a Ph.D. student. Being highly interested in studying inflammatory signaling pathways in cancer development and progression, Laura moved to the United States to work in Dr. Michael Karin’s

laboratory in the Department of Pharmacology at UCSD, in June 2014. Laura's recent research work has been focused on the molecular mechanisms involved in the initial oncogenic transformation of KRAS-initiated pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) precursors. To allow

a rapid and thorough dissection of the mechanisms underlying oxidative stress-induced malignant progression and identification of critical targets for PDAC interception and treatment, Laura has

recently established an experimental system in which oxidative stress, converts premalignant pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia type 1 (PanIN1) to PDAC progenitors under well controlled in vitro (outside the living organism, in a test tissue culture dish) conditions. Using this system, Laura’s research work aims to evaluate the impact of the metabolic and epigenetic reprogramming downstream oxidative stress-mediated malignant transformation on the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME) and PDAC drug resistance. Targeting

PDAC-specific metabolic pathways represents a novel approach to the development of new therapies that will starve PDAC, and possibly other cancer types, to death. Furthermore, the identification of PDAC-specific signaling and metabolic pathways offers new opportunities for

biomarker discovery that will improve early detection and patient stratification.

Anupriya Singhal is a medical oncology fellow in the Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  Her research interest is in understanding how pancreatic cancer evades response to therapy, with the hope that basic insights into mechanisms of cellular adaptation will open new therapeutic avenues. For her current project, she is studying how treatment resistance evolves in response to KRAS inhibitors, a novel drug class that is expected to have a major impact on the therapeutic paradigm in pancreatic cancer. Her HBF project uses novel genetically engineered mouse models of pancreatic cancer to study how specific subpopulations of pancreatic cancer cells evolve over time using lineage tracing and high-resolution genomic approaches. These studies aim to identify vulnerabilities of drug-resistant cell populations and exploit these for benefit to patients. Anupriya is mentored by Dr. Tuomas Tammela, a lab head at Sloan Kettering Institute, and Dr. Eileen O'Reilly and Dr. Kenneth Yu on the Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology Service at MSKCC.

Anupriya holds a bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Master's Degree in Computer Science from Harvard University. After undergraduate training, she joined the Tri-Institutional M.D. Ph.D. Program, where she received her medical degree from Weill Cornell Medical College and Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University. She completed her training in Internal Medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital before joining the medical oncology fellowship program at MSKCC. Outside of the lab, she enjoys trekking around NYC with her husband and two daughters.

Daniel Nussbaum is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Duke University, where he serves as a hepatobiliary surgical oncologist and pancreatic cancer researcher within the Department of Surgery.  He completed his surgical training at Duke University, including a postdoctoral fellowship in cancer biology, followed by a clinical fellowship in complex general surgical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  His clinical practice is almost entirely devoted to patients with pancreatic, liver, and biliary malignancies. His translational research interests are largely focused on devising strategies to detect and target occult hepatic metastases in patients with pancreas cancer, and he has developed one of the first model systems to study occult metastatic disease in human patients.  The backbone of this model is an IRB-approved protocol to acquire surgical biopsies of “normal” patient livers prior to the development of gross hepatic metastasis (in addition to blood, primary tumor, and regional lymph node samples). Then, through a set of single-cell sequencing and spatial biology techniques, these samples can be probed with exquisite precision to explore the microenvironmental determinants of disease progression. The long-term goal of this research effort is to develop novel strategies directly targeting occult metastatic disease—which currently represents the major cause of recurrence and mortality for patients with radiographically localized tumors—in order to offer truly curative treatment options for these patients.

  Dr. Sheila Alcantara Llaguno is a Senior Research Scientist at the Brain Tumor Center and the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. Her primary research interest is in understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of initiation and progression of primary central nervous system malignancies. Dr. Alcantara is particularly interested in the population of self-renewing cancer cells that behave like stem cells in brain tumors. To investigate these stem-like cancer cells, Dr. Alcantara developed a novel genetic mouse model that induces highly aggressive medulloblastoma with leptomeningeal metastasis. Her HBF project aims to study the role of cancer stem cells and metastatic stem cells in medulloblastoma, which have been implicated as important drivers of tumor growth, metastatic spread and resistance to therapies. These studies will open avenues for identifying new treatment strategies for these high-risk cancers in children. Dr. Alcantara finished her bachelor’s degree (molecular biology and biotechnology), medical degree and internship at the University of the Philippines in Manila where she graduated with honors. She then earned her PhD from UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, where she did her postdoctoral fellowship and continued at Sloan Kettering, under the mentorship of Dr. Luis Parada. Dr. Alcantara received the Young Investigator Award from the Children’s Tumor Foundation and has published seminal papers on the cell of origin and molecular subtyping of glioblastoma. She currently resides in shoreline Connecticut with her husband Marc, a cryo-EM scientist, and their goose-loving, incorrigible terrier, Chewie Einstein.

Dr. Tringale is currently a radiation oncology resident physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Before starting her residency, she completed her internship in Internal Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended Brown University for college, where she received her degree in biomedical engineering with a focus on neuroscience. Before attending medical school, she continued her undergraduate thesis work in brain computer interface clinical trials with the BrainGate group at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Throughout medical school at the University of California San Diego, she was involved in a variety of research endeavors, including clinical trials focused on quantifying the neurotoxicity of radiation treatment for primary brain tumors. The thesis for her master’s degree in clinical research investigated the use of advanced diffusion imaging techniques as biomarkers for neurocognitive performance in patients undergoing brain radiotherapy. Now as a radiation oncology resident, she has continued these efforts by developing a prospective clinical trial to investigate functional MRI biomarkers of neurocognitive decline in pediatric patients after proton beam radiation treatment for brain tumors. She has a strong interest in studying the long-term toxicity of cancer treatment, including quality of life and neurocognition, in survivors throughout her career as a radiation oncologist and clinical trialist. 

William L. Hwang is a radiation oncologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Instructor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School, and Andrew L. Warshaw, MD Institute for Pancreatic Cancer Research Fellow. As a physician-scientist, William specializes in the treatment of gastrointestinal cancers and his research program is focused on investigating the interactions among pancreatic cancer cells and their microenvironment at high resolution using single-cell omics and multiplexed imaging techniques. William is particularly interested in the synergy between cancer cells and nerves, pathways by which therapies reprogram the tumor microenvironment and foster the development of resistance, and the mechanisms underlying tumorigenesis to foster early detection and preventative strategies.William holds bachelor’s degrees in Biomedical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Physics from Duke University, where he was an Angier B. Duke Scholar. He received a master’s degree in Chemistry at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his MD (summa cum laude) at Harvard Medical School as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and PhD in Biophysics at Harvard University. William completed his internship in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital where he received the Resident Teaching Award in Medicine, and residency training in the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program. 

Dr. Raghavan is a physician-scientist in the Department of Medical Oncology and the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on understanding how tumor cell states and the tumor microenvironment regulate therapeutic sensitivity and resistance in pancreatic cancer. To this end, Dr. Raghavan uses novel technologies such as single-cell sequencing and genomic and pharmacologic perturbation to interrogate clinical specimens and patient-derived tissue models with the goal of identifying new therapeutic vulnerabilities in pancreatic cancer. He is also involved in translational efforts to examine whether drug sensitivity testing in patient-derived tumor organoid models can predict clinical responses. Dr. Raghavan received his bachelor’s degree (chemical engineering) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.D. and Ph.D. (biomedical engineering) from Johns Hopkins University, and is performing his post-doctoral research under the mentorship of Drs. William Hahn and Brian Wolpin at DFCI and the Broad Institute. In addition to his research efforts, Dr. Raghavan is a practicing medical oncologist and sees patients at DFCI and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In the longer term, Dr. Raghavan hopes to continue integrating his clinical and research efforts to develop new therapeutic options for patients with pancreatic cancer.