2020 Landry Fellows

Beatrice Awasthi

Beatrice Awasthi
Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Kevin Haigis Lab

Beatrice graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in biological sciences and an M.Eng. in biomedical engineering. At Cornell, she worked in the lab of Dr. David Putnam on the development of vaccine adjuvants. During the summers, she held internships at the biotech company Amgen and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany, studying insulin resistance and its connection to Alzheimer’s disease. Now a PhD candidate in the lab of Dr. Kevin Haigis at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, she is interested in context-specific substrate phosphorylation by ERK in colorectal and pancreatic cancer.

Nicholas Haradhvala

Nicholas Haradhvala
Biophysics, Gad Getz Lab

Nick Haradhvala grew up in Weston, Massachusetts, and graduated from Carleton College in 2014 with a bachelors in Mathematics. He then joined the laboratory of Dr. Gad Getz at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital studying cancer genomics, and in 2018 began his PhD in the Harvard Biophysics program mentored by Dr. Getz. A primary focus of his research has been studying the ways in which DNA damage and faulty repair drive distinct patterns of mutation observed in cancer genomes. In addition, he works with single-cell RNA sequencing technologies to study how the tumor microenvironment influences cancer development, progression, and drug resistance.

Alissandra Hillis

Alissandra Hillis
Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Alex Toker Lab

Alissandra graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Biology. Alissandra spent her four years at MIT in Dr. Matthew Vander Heiden’s lab studying the role of the glycolytic enzyme, pyruvate kinase 2 (PKM2), in pancreatic cancer. To explore a more clinical approach to cancer research, Alissandra also spent a summer in Dr. David Ting’s Lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center where she studied pancreatic cancer exosomes. At Harvard, Alissandra joined the lab of Dr. Alex Toker with the goal of exploiting cancer signaling signatures to identify targetable vulnerabilities.

Sadie Piatt

Sadie Piatt
Biophysics, Joseph Loparo Lab

Sadie grew up in Milwaukee, WI and completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at Emmanuel College. There, she worked under Dr. Allen Price to study the DNA target site search mechanisms of restriction endonucleases at the single-molecule level. To continue developing her skills imaging protein-DNA interaction dynamics, she joined Dr. Joseph Loparo’s lab as a biophysics graduate student investigating the regulation of error-prone translesion polymerases at stalled replication forks. Understanding the consequences of replicating damaged DNA templates is essential to developing informed models of the basic biochemical drivers of cancer, as dysregulation of these processes destabilizes genome integrity. Sadie is excited to build upon her interest in pathways driven by DNA damage and hopes to shed light on factors that trigger and exacerbate unchecked mutagenesis.

Lisa Situ

Lisa Situ
Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Karen Cichowski Lab

Lisa was raised in southern California and graduated magna cum laude with highest departmental honors from the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a bachelor's degree in molecular, cell, and developmental biology, with a minor in biomedical research. At UCLA, she spent three years in Dr. Heather Christofk's laboratory, studying viral reprogramming of host metabolism, as a model to identify critical nodes of anabolism that may also be important in cancer. Committed to cancer research, Lisa joined Dr. Karen Cichowski's laboratory, where she now hopes to explore novel therapies for melanoma, focusing on the interplay between mitochondrial dynamics and the Ras signaling pathway.