CoL Centre 2024 Students

Abigail is a PhD student based both at the Barts Cancer Institute (BCI, QMUL) and UCL Cancer Institute. Primarily, she is supervised by Dr Miguel Ganuza at BCI, with secondary supervision from Dr Beth Payne at UCL. Her research project aims to modify the impact of chemotherapeutics on clonal selection in Clonal Haematopoiesis. She investigates both the driving forces behind clonal selection and use various therapeutic approaches to prevent progression to therapy-related AML. To do this she is using a range of in vitro and in vivo models.

Before starting her PhD, Abigail completed an Integrated Masters in Biomedical Science at the University of Birmingham. Her dissertation focused on the role of NM23-H1 on Tumour Associated Macrophages in DLBCL. She received the Royal Society of Biology Advanced Accreditation Top Project Award, alongside the special recommendation prize and Y4 Top project award. Additionally, she was honoured to represent her cohort and address the congregation at her graduation ceremony.

Claire-iona is a CRUK CoL Center PhD student working on phenotypically characterising DNA damage response dependencies identified from whole genome CRISPR screens. She is primarily based at Guy’s Cancer Center under the supervision of Dr Graeme Hewitt (KCL), with additional supervision from Prof Chris Tape (UCL).

Claire-iona did a BSc in Biochemistry at KCL and an MSc in Cancer at UCL. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a research technician at the UCL Cancer Institute for a year and a half, where she focused on targeted protein degradation technology in the context of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) with Dr Rob Sellar.

Isabella is PhD student supervised by Benny Chain in the Innate2Adaptive research group in the Division of Infection and Immunity at UCL. Her research focuses on modelling the co-evolution of a tumour’s genomic landscape and TCR repertoire to further our understanding of how the immune system regulates tumour growth.

Isabella has a BSc from Georgetown University where she majored in Biology with minors in Mathematics and Computer Science, and a MSc in Applied Genomics from Imperial. During her MSc, she did her research project in the Cancer Dynamics lab at the Francis Crick Institute which focused on understanding the role of structural variants in the evolution of ccRCC predisposition syndromes. Before starting her PhD, she spent six months in the Multiple Myeloma lab at UCL Cancer Institute analysing scRNAseq data to research the role of NK cells in disease progression.

Sophia did a double degree in math and computer science in France at CentraleSupelec and ENS.

She is now doing a PhD in Simone Zaccaria’s lab at the UCL Cancer Institute. She previously joined the same lab to do an 6 months internship and was working on developing a computational method to infer copy-number alterations from Targeted DNA single-cell sequencing.

Zeta studied an MSci in Pharmacology at King’s College London and graduated this year. She undertook a professional placement year at pharmaceutical company GSK working on therapeutic monoclonal antibody drug discovery platforms using in vivo and in vitro models.

Her PhD research is on paediatric diffuse midline glioma (DMG) tumours through a collaboration between KCL and UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. She aims to use focused ultrasound and nanodroplets for the delivery of a STING agonist to the inoperable paediatric brain tumours in a multidisciplinary project.

Aiman graduated from Monash University in 2013 with MBBS and Bachelor of Medical Science, during which he did research with carbonate-apatite nanoparticles as a novel drug delivery device for insulin. He undertook medical training followed by 3 years of haematology specialty training in Doha, Qatar. He then started haematology specialty training under the East-of-England deanery in 2022, and completed 2 years before joining as a PhD student under the CRUK CoL Clinical Research Training Fellowship programme with Dr Diu Nguyen at Barts Cancer Institute. Aiman’s PhD project involves identifying RNA-binding proteins that serve as a vulnerability in acute myeloid leukaemia, which can potentially be targeted as a novel therapeutic option.

Dina studied Medicine at Bristol University, and currently a Haematology trainee at UCLH. On the Cancer Research UK City of London Clinical Research Fellow PhD Programme, based at QMUL with Paolo Gallipoli’s group and KCH with Lynn Quek’s group.

The project will focus on metabolic rewiring in acute myeloid leukaemia cells and in immune cells during treatment, to define metabolic pathways associated with treatment resistance and relapse.